Excellent article!

The only thing I would add is "getting used to being blamed". 😛 Network sucks, it’s DBA’s fault. SAN collapse, it’s DBA’s fault. Programmer updated data without a WHERE clause, it’s DBA’s fault….blah..blah..blah

Something else I liked to share: I was a programmer before becoming a DBA. I thought I knew how to program a database-driven application…..I was wrong. I didn’t know anything about indexes or how to write good queries. I wrote whatever that would gave me results then moved on. Yeah I was stupid and ignorance, but just learned lately that I’m not alone. There are still new programmers out there making the same mistakes I made, and I had to support their databases. Yikes! Talk about Karma, eh?

One question as a newbie: Do you need to know about database design and/or application in order to do performance tuning? I know about Profiler and PerfMon, but I wonder if these tools are enough to say these are good/bad queries without any knowledge of applications?

Regards,

P.S forgive my poor English.