Day 30 as DBA
This follow-on to the Day 1 as DBA show will go into the things you can do now that you’re semi-established in your routines. Daily maintenance, auditing, security checks, best practices and more. There is a lot to consider and think about when you’re putting a good foundation in place for your systems, we’ll cover check point items here and keep you up to speed on "what’s next."
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> Live date: 8/14/2007
SQL Server In-Person Training
Looking for some great Business Intelligence training? There is a lot to the whole Business Intelligence picture, from Analysis Services to Reporting Services and all of the supporting tools and technologies that make BI possible. Getting good, solid information and training on how these tools work and how you apply them to your business is key to your success. If you’re working through BI projects, or will be soon, you should check out Symphic Technology – they have classes and workshops in these areas, with a few seats remaing in some select courses for summer scheduling. Find out more, here.
Thoughts About Being a "Real" DBA
Wanted to pass along thoughts from Thomas on what a "real" DBA is all about:
What’s a “Real” DBA? – Interesting question.
Let’s look at D-B-A. Data Base Administrator
I’ve done this type of work since 1984. A large majority of it on IBM mainframe systems in IMS and DB2. But also SQL Server and some dabbling in Oracle.
In all cases, in each company, the “Administration” of the databases was the key aspect of the job. Are they up and available for the company to conduct business? Are they backed up in a fashion that you can recover from an application error (delete without a WHERE clause), a disk device crash, a loss of the data center itself? Are you meeting any industry-particular laws and regulations?
Now that the databases are up and available, you have a good backup plan in place – are the databases performing well? Regular reorg maintenance happening to keep them performing? Do you have an application “Pig” list of those programs that are having performance issues – do you need indexes to provide a better data path? Is the data clustered and stored in the order of ABC but the majority of the application access is by ZYX?
Development work – yes that can be worked in here too. But normally the companies (now size does matter) pay developers to develop and DBA’s to Administrate. Yes the two can come together, and should, for major development projects that are going to beat the daylights out of existing databases – or cause you to add a new wing to the building to hold the data the new 600 databases will be holding. There should be some sort of DBA presence in application system design meetings. Maybe not from the very first day, but certainly at a point before the project is cast in stone and “now” you find out that they did not have a true picture of the real database world in your shop. Once the train has left the platform, it is usually next to impossible to stop it – even times when you can prove that it is headed for a wreck.
Software vendors and their products: Normally two requests from them. 1) their product “truly” makes my life easier as a DBA in “administrating” my databases 2) it works properly and doesn’t break anything. How many times have I been using a database change tool and it gets the data unloaded, modifies the structure of the database object, but now has a “bug / feature” that doesn’t allow it to reload the data? A backup tool that doesn’t remember what it backed up yesterday – let alone last week?
Development work – yes it would be fun to write some code and produce some reports for company managers and directors. But if they were asked to determine which aspect of the DBA’s job was to be put on hold for a couple weeks or months – would they say the administration part to allow the reports to be created? (and yes these could be very crucial to the company) – or – would they determine there may be a legitimate separation of administration and development and have a programmer / developer create the report system?
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