Comments on: April Question: What advice would you offer a novice DBA in order to help them along in their career?

By: bradmcgehee

bradmcgehee — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:20:23 +0000

Find out the winner of the SQL Aloha Question of the Month by visiting: http://www.bradmcgehee.com/2010/05/winner-of-the-april-sql-aloha-contest/

By: bradmcgehee

bradmcgehee — Mon, 03 May 2010 03:06:05 +0000

Thanks for all the entries for the April contest. This month’s contest is closed and the winner will be announced the first week of May.

By: Rahul

Rahul — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:37:58 +0000

Don’t forget that you are a human who has physical, moral and social responsibilities to self and to others; and a DBA later, who has the supreme responsibilities of guarding the data for his/her organization.

Seriously, I would tell this, than anything else. I would continue this as follows:

As a human, you should ensure that you execute your duty as a DBA with utmost care, keep yourself continuously updated, and never believe that what you have designed/developed/maintaining is full-proof. Always be open to ideas or suggestions, even if they are coming from your juniors.

And as a DBA, take care that you are not a machine running on a 365x24x7 basis with a 99.995 SLA guaranteed uptime. Enjoy what you are doing, because if you are in it just for a living, you would not be able to sustain it beyond a point. And take time out for your family, for the wonderful people around you, and for the nature. Life after-all is not data, number crunching and weary eyes staring at the monitor in the wrong hours of the night. Take these situations in your stride as a part-and-parcel of your job, but also learn to look beyond these things to the liveliness of life, and its good things… and remember

All good things in life are essentially free!!!

By: Marianne

Marianne — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:11:55 +0000

Learn as much as you can. Join PASS, join a local SQL user group as well as the Virtual DBA group. Some of the local SQL groups have mentoring. PragmaticWorks has free training as well as paid classes. They post some of the past sessions on their website. Check out blogs as well as sites like http://sqlchicken.com/ for additional information. Also load the eval. version of SQL Server Enterprise Edition on your home computer and play around with it. Try to learn as much as you can and try to keep current. There is a wealth of knowledge out there for you.

By: Fran Sunny

Fran Sunny — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:55:04 +0000

What I started by following the DBA check lists for the essential tasks.
Learning and Learning all the time. There are many great people and websites online sharing tips and helping questions.
I echo Mark and Andrew – Backup is a very key task to save our jobs.

By: Amy

Amy — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:07:55 +0000

1. Don’t take the first job that comes along just to get your foot in the door. This could set you up for failure. If you are hired as the only DBA and get the pleasure of cleaning up well-intentioned database messes from the past, you will quickly begin to question your DBA career.

2. Make sure backups are in place and can be succesfully restored.

3. Learn something new every day, no matter how trivial.

4. Keep a folder with “how-tos” and queries that you learn. You will need them again one day.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:27:22 +0000

I agree with Andrew, the data is the key to your job.

1:Backups, backups, backups be sure you have them in place for production, and either in place for dev/test or documentation from your management that dev/test are not needed. Always try to get something for dev/test as well, never good to have developers/testers pointing to the dba that they can not work.

2:Access to data control and available, if the users can not get to the data then it never becomes information that they can use, if the wrorg people get to the data then it becomes information that can hurt your company.

3:Backups, backups, backups, practice the different types of restores and recovers to confirm that you can restore from your given media and to reinforce the options youy have should you have an issue pop up. You want to be able to talk to your management team and clearly layout what options they have and why.

4: Have a good realationship with your management, you operations team, your systems team, your network team, your development team and your user community. They are all critical to your success.

5: Have fun, enjoy the opportunities that areise each day and learn, learn, learn.

6:Double check those backups.

By: Jim Young

Jim Young — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:31:00 +0000

1. Always keep learning, because none of us knows it all. There are many resources out there, starting with SQL Server Books Online. There is also an ever-increasing community of talented DBAs out there that can help. Use those resources.

2. Measure twice, cut once. Always test changes in a non-production environment first, no matter how insignificant they may seem. We all make mistakes – try to make them in the place where it matters least.

3. Learn the tools of the trade before you try to invent new ones. SQL Server has lots of functionality that often goes untapped. (See #1.)

4. Be proactive and automate as much as possible. Read up on best practices and work towards implementing sound maintenance routines that will help keep you “out of the weeds” and providing value to your organization. We are sometimes called upon to be firefighters, but there’s a reason we don’t get those cool helmets – we shouldn’t be doing it all the time. (When we’re going good, we’re more like Smokey the Bear.)