Congratulations You're a DBA…Now What?!

by Feb 11, 2015

This is a guest article by SQL Server MVP Mike Walsh (www.straightpathsql.com | www.linchpinpeople.com), based on an Embarcadero sponsored webinar by Mike Walsh and John Sterrett (www.johnsterrett.com).

Introduction

Being a DBA can be challenging and frustrating. There is always a lot to learn, many priorities and not enough hours in the day to get it all done. We love these kind of topics because it’s good to get back to basics and re-shift priorities and focus as you go.

DBArtisan Free TrialWhere Do You Start?!?!

The answer is: Focus on the priority items and in priority order. We suggested these items in this order:

  1. Recoverability
  2. Security and Auditability
  3. Reliability – Keep The Lights On Availability
  4. Performance

We also suggest a task for each area as a “do now” task. While there are countless tasks for each of the areas of focus, we are hoping that the starting suggestion for each area can help:

Recoverability
Go and ensure that your backups are running. Then try and perform a test restore. Remember, the focus is on restore with Recoverability, not backup. Also, go and talk with the business decision makers. Are you on the same page with them for your recovery goals?

Security and Auditability
Look to see who is in the System Administrator Fixed Server role. Does it make sense? If not, make a plan to deal with it.

Keep the Lights on Availability
Setup SQL Server alerting. It should take you no more than 15 minutes. This blog post and video (www.linchpinpeople.com/how-to-set-up-sql-server-alerts/) will guide you here.

Performance
Start monitoring with perfmon and create some baselines to review. (www.linchpinpeople.com/how-create-sql-server-baseline-using-pal/)

Congratulations You're a DBA webinar on demandNext Steps

As we talked about the during the webinar, you can see some resources and other links at a “living” post over on our Linchpin People site (http://linchpinpeople.com/where). Please bookmark that page or go back and visit from time to time. As we answer questions and review the presentation materials in the coming weeks we’ll add resources to that site.

For more information, you can check out the full webinar, available on demand.

Learn more about DBArtisan, the premier cross-platform database administration tool, and try DBArtisan for free.