Production Database Administration

I was talking to a DBA friend of mine, reminiscing about some of the hard lessons we learned early on in our career. The more we talked, the more we realized that there should probably be a one-page cheat-sheet that you’re required to read before you open SQL Server Management Studio. 1. The name of…

At the start of my classes and calls, I ask folks to introduce themselves – not by what it says on their email signature, but by the kind of tasks they spend most of their time on. Here’s what I show onscreen to help illustrate it: DBA job duties Down the left hand side of…

Sounds impossible, right? The saying goes that you can never be too rich or too thin or have too much memory. However, there is one good indication that your SQL Server is probably overprovisioned, and to explain it, I need to cover 3 metrics. 1. Max Server Memory is set at the instance level: right-click…

This isn’t about having a sucky job, this is about you sucking at your job. There’s a big difference. You could be sucking at your job because you hate your job and just don’t care. I get that. In that case though, you know better but choose not to do better. I’ve encountered some people…

You read a lot of advice that says you shouldn’t shrink databases, but…why? To demonstrate, I’m going to: Create a database Create a ~1GB table with 5M rows in it Put a clustered index on it, and check its fragmentation Look at my database’s empty space Shrink the database to get rid of the empty…

Database Reliability Engineering – good buy When you see the cover of Database Reliability Engineering, the first question you’re probably gonna ask is, “Wait – how is this different from database administration?” And I’ve got good news: that’s the very first thing @LaineVCampbell and Charity Majors (@MipsyTipsy) cover in the preface. “…for a long long…

Remember that very first day when you officially became a Database Administrator? Remember how the Senior DBA sat you down and gave you clear, specific instructions on how to handle SQL Server? No? You don’t remember that? That’s because it rarely happens. You just happened to be the one standing closest to the database server…