As A DBA, Where Do I Start?

This presentation is aimed at the starting DBA, accidental DBA or developer having to wear a DBA hat occasionally. It was written to hopefully convey the important order of operations to a DBA just starting out and walk through the “itties” of Database Administration. This has been delivered at:

Related Blog Posts At StraightPath Consulting

Tools Discussed

During the presentation, I go through a few different tools. Some links to more info about them:

Some Other Links/Resources

I haven’t read this book yet but I plan on doing a review when it starts shipping. Knowing Tom from his blog, his online presence and some conversations with him, I have a feeling this book is designed for the same people this presentation is designed for. You can pre-order DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Start DBA on Amazon.

Brent Ozar gives a presentation that goes through a script that you can run (With comments) to investigate your own environment for violations of the “itties” we discuss. As with any code, run it in test/dev first, be familiar with it before running it and then enjoy (or dread) the results. You can get the code for this here.

The Presentation

(v1.0, as presented at SQL Saturday #34 in Waltham, MA on 1/30/2010)

Questions/Comments?

Send your questions to mike at the domain of this blog or add comments below  and I will get back to you and update here if necessary.

  • One Comment – I received at the Waltham event in the halls after speaking was, “Set it and forget it is my whole goal!” in response to the notion that SQL Server is -not-“set it and forget it”. Great Point. We should strive, in a way, to make our environments bet in a set and forget state. By focusing on the itties we talked about in the presentation, getting a monitoring tool setup (I use SQL Sentry and Quest Spotlight typically in environments I work with) and developing a good maintenance routine, we can get closer to that point. But this is something we work towards. SQL Server is not set-it-and-forget-it out of the box :). I know the person mentioning this to me knew that and was raising a great point. Let’s try and get our environments into this mode.

Subscribe for Updates

Name

4 thoughts on “As A DBA, Where Do I Start?”

  1. Nice job last night, Mike! I did research that ? on differential backups and believe I am right about the recovery. You only recover the most recent diff backup – NOT all diff backups since the full.
    BTW, congrats on the new addition to your family. He looks like a sweetie.

    Reply
    • Yeah that is what you and I were thinking originally. I have since talked to the person who disagreed. He was thinking of the concept of “incremental” backups. Yes – for differential only the latest. Glad you enjoyed the presentation.

      Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.