Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren, founder of SQLServerCentral and member of the PASS Board of Directors.
You may have heard the phrase “accidental DBA” to describe how many in our profession come to be DBA’s, either full or part time. It’s a challenge that’s common to many businesses as they grow to the point of needing someone to take care of database related work. Did you know that there are also many “Incidental DBA’s”? That’s what I call those managers, developers, and business owners that really have no interest (or time) to do anything with SQL Server that doesn’t have to be done. They own SQL Server because their third party software requires it, or they needed something a little more robust than Access to power their web site, but they really aren’t do anything that requires much time or attention.
It’s easy to forget that not everyone has lots of change, lots of data, lots of ‘stuff’ going on. I was doing a presentation at a user group earlier this year and during the follow up discussion someone had a question about maintenance plans and indexing. I answered with my thoughts, and then someone else spoke up and said that they had been in business five years and as far as he knew they had no maintenance plan and had never heard about index defragmentation. His follow up comment was that since performance had been fine, what value would there be in rebuilding indexes? Now that might horrify you as a DBA, but to me it was a great view into a world different than my own. As much as I believe in index rebuilds as part of ongoing maintenance, here was a case where it didn’t matter, and probably won’t matter in another five years either. Even if it does end up causing a problem, it’s an hour fix once someone with some knowledge gets involved. My best answer – a little lacking I thought – was to think of it like routine maintenance on a car, you do it it to head off problems that you otherwise won’t know about until too late.
The tendency is for us power users is to say that users shouldn’t use a product they don’t understand. But in the real world, I drive a car with a automatic transmission. I get the idea, no clue on the details, and if breaks, I’ll take it someone that understands how to fix it. Sometimes we’re going to get those calls and when we fix something, we can share a few ideas about how to prevent it happening again. Incidental DBA’s may or may not listen because SQL Server is something they touch because they have to, and they would much prefer that they didn’t have to touch it at all.
