DBA work, production ownership, operational judgment, and expectations.
36 associated posts33 primary posts
You're busy, so I'll keep this short.
Several months from now, you're gonna have a salary review. Your manager is going to ask what you've been up to, and you're not going to have a lot of great answers. Copilot isn't tracking your successes for you.
It's the end of the year. Everybody's coasting and looking back. Let's kick our heels up, get comfortable, and talk big picture industry stuff.
You and me, our weirdo jobs involve:
One of my favorite uses for AI is to ask it to explain a concept using wildly unusual points of view.
Well, we're going to be seeing various family members and friends for the holidays, and we'll get endless questions of, "So, what is it that you do?" I figured ChatGPT would be the perfect source for answers.
I ran a poll over on LinkedIn to find out if people have 100% of their databases under some kind of source control or version control.
I broke the answers up into two sets, developers and non-developers, because I had a hunch that the developers' answers would be very different than the rest, and indeed they were:
"The last person must have set it up that way."
"The last person wrote that code."
For this month's TSQLTuesday, I asked y'all to describe the most recent issues you closed.
If you ask someone in IT, "What do you do for a living?" they struggle with job titles. They say things like:
Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. Today, I'm dodging work, so I went through your questions while I waited for the coffee shop to open:
https://youtu.be/xBxvb6vy97U
A DBA makes sure the databases are backed up, well-configured, patched, secure, and fast. I explain my job to acquaintances by saying, "You know how some web sites are really slow, and their checkout times out, or it loses your data? It's my responsibility to make sure those problems don't happen. I'm not the only…
Who can get you fired? Run our free sp_Blitz stored procedure on one of your production servers and pay particular attention to the Security section of the results. It lists the logins who have been granted the sysadmin or security admin roles.
Don't think of them as logins.
I'm finishing up a bit of a summer tour - Techorama Belgium, SQL Saturday Dallas, SQL Saturday South Florida, and this week, SQL Intersection in Orlando - and I've gotten the same question from several attendees. It goes something like this: "My company hasn't moved to the cloud yet, but at every conference session, I…
All of these are doable with scripts, tools, and/or elbow grease, mind you - they're just not as easy as they sound at first glance until you know about the existence of those scripts, tools, and/or free people waiting around with spare elbow grease. "Go through the log and find out who ran this query." "Apps sometimes…
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 the job isn't necessarily what it does. That "Backup All Databases" job probably doesn't, and it probably has a shrink step in there for good measure.
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: Down the left hand side of the screen are…
Long before the "full stack developer" phrase became fashionable, us early developers did exactly that. We didn't do any of these full time, mind you - full stack doesn't mean full time.
Here's a grid I use to explain the work involved in building and troubleshooting database apps:
When Windows Server 2012 came out with Core, I heard some rather suspicious things at conferences like:
"I'll be able to take way less patching outages!"
"It'll be so much faster because it has less overhead!"
"Everyone will learn automation and be more powerful!"
"It's the way of the future! Learn it or your career is doomed!"
HW - if all you do is rack & stack hardware, you can manage thousands of boxes. You see this at Facebook/Google type scales.
OS - when you're responsible for troubleshooting operating system problems (as opposed to simply re-imaging the box from scratch), you can manage hundreds of boxes or VMs.
5. Turning on auto-shrink It might make disk space alerts go away for a minute, but it can cause lots of problems. 4. Enabling xp_cmdshell and giving the SQL Server account administrative rights in Windows Young DBAs often do this to try to get a quick fix in place to manage backup files. Later on,…
I've worked with source control quite a bit over the years -- everything from ye olde Visual Source Safe to Subversion to TFS. I even supported the Source Depot system at Microsoft as an engineer for a year back in the day!
These days I don't use source control a ton. We keep repositories of scripts in GitHub to help manage our scripts as a team, but I don't really use it often enough to learn the command line well.
Recently I saw a tweet that said, "If you can't read a query execution plan, you're not a production DBA."I love execution plans, and there are really great reasons to learn to read execution plans, but I disagree completely.Database Administration is not all about performancePerformance is only one component to database administration. Let's take Jill as…
I know a lot of DBAs, but it's really, really rare that I've seen one get fired. I don't think it's ever happened during one of my consulting engagements, and I've seen some incredibly horrific database disasters (not to mention a whole lotta ugly near-misses).
So I asked Twitter:
