Ill add an extra point 🙂

#Get to know your general IT support structure you don't control

Over the years ive been databasing, ive got to know how our IT support works here (and more importantly common problems that seem to re-occur). Knowing the really good guys (and building those working relationships that let you bypass red tape), and knowing the `holes` in support.

For me it helps prioritise my first trouble shooting steps, especially for those trickier things. e.g. We had an access gui that connected over odbc to an sql server. All was fine for months - then some new machines were installed. Some processes in the front end that were normally instant suddenly took minutes. Spent all sorts of time profiling this, checking that. Turned out to be missing DNS entries for the sql server were causing the problem! Now when I see slow connections to a newly set up sql server, its the first thing I check. It has happened again!

martin 🙂