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Ten Ways To Lose Your DBA Job

  • November 30, 2006 at 8:01 am

    #674935

    This is a excellent article and a very good reminder on not to be complacent...

  • November 30, 2006 at 8:33 am

    #674941

    This should be required reading for all DBAs.

     

    K. Brian Kelley
    @kbriankelley

  • November 30, 2006 at 8:48 am

    #674955

    i totally agree !

  • November 30, 2006 at 8:49 am

    #674956

    This is excellent material and oh my goodness, do I appreciate it!  I'm one of those people who got the title 'DBA' tacked to my name because I was granted access to some back end functions of our database.  Although very practiced with tape backup and restore (we seem to have a lot of delete-happy individuals), I only know enough about SQL to know that I'm no DBA!

    I've skimmed lots of books and online training, but I never knew where to focus my efforts. This article has now become my Intro to SQL path.  I will begin by finding out what a "bookmark lookup or clustered index" is...

    Thank you!!

  • November 30, 2006 at 9:12 am

    #674965

    great article,

     

    It's a wonderful Idea to do something about the general level of expertise in the DBA world. It's a bit of a problem, because it is one of the Microsoft's selling points that anybody can set up and run a SQL server. on the other hand, it is still a RDBMS and needs to be managed. I myself sort of "fell" into a DBA role, and now that I look back, I am amazed just how little I knew about databases in general and managed to run them, and even upgraded 6.5 to 7.0. would love to see more on this topic.

     

    Mest Regrads,

     

    Mor DeRor

  • November 30, 2006 at 9:49 am

    #674988

    Fine article, Steve.  I think all of your points are sound and useful.  I've been doing DBA work for a decade and I still need to be reminded to come back to the basics - just like a hockey team that needs to re-learn clearing the defensive zone and getting the puck in deep.

    One or two other posts mentioned soft skills.  I think that needs to be on the list as well.  I've known a few DBAs that I wouldn't let near my pets.   It may be easy to learn best practices for designing, developing and operating SQL Server (or any RDBMS) systems, but it can be a subtle political game to convince other folks in the organization that they really provide value to the business.

    Regards,

     

    -Peter

  • November 30, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    #675055

    Thanks everyone for the comments and glad you liked the article. I'm kind of stunned by the response.

    My apologies on the counting. I wrote the list and then started to expand and somehow got out of sync. I hate to edit it now or your comments won't make sense.

    Also, thanks for the note on Patch Tuesday. I'm so used to just seeing the news and not paying attention to the date.

  • December 1, 2006 at 8:23 am

    #675156

    I think that social interactions are really important.  That is why I wear industrial strength ear protectors when I work.

  • December 1, 2006 at 8:24 am

    #675157

    I think that social interactions are really important.  That is why I wear industrial strength ear protectors when I work.

  • December 1, 2006 at 10:01 am

    #675192

    Another great article, Steve!

    I know it's good to keep it short, but I would expand the "Null math" section to include awareness of the ANSI_NULLS option and its effect on Null comparisons.

    Assume the Customers table has some rows where the region field is NULL.  What results would you expect from the following sample query (copied from BOL)?

    SELECT CustomerID, CompanyName, RegionFROM Northwind.dbo.CustomersWHERE Region = NULL
    How about 
    SELECT CustomerID, CompanyName, RegionFROM Northwind.dbo.CustomersWHERE Region <> NULL

    If your first question isn't about the ANSI_NULLS setting, you might want to look it up in BOL. If it's set to TRUE, neither of the above queries will ever return any data. According to BOL, ANSI_NULLS is set to OFF by default.  But BOL also says "By default, ODBC and OLE DB clients issue a connection-level SET statement setting ANSI_NULLS to ON for the session when connecting to SQL Server."

    What do you think, should we fire the SQL Server DBA who writes queries with "= NULL" or "<> NULL" instead of using "IS NULL" or "IS NOT NULL"?

  • December 1, 2006 at 10:06 am

    #675194

    You probably need some sort of interaction skills, but social skills ? As a former colleague once said, I work with them but would I want to go down the pub with them ? nah!!!

    It's good to be an independent DBA ( contractor/consultant ) don't have to worry so much about office politics, you can also decide to move on!!

    I think Steve, people liked your article, myself included, as it was to the point - I know you've done articles about what makes a DBA, what duties etc. .. but these vary much more depending upon your exact role - this was to the point real essentials!!

    [font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
    www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
    http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/

  • December 1, 2006 at 6:34 pm

    #675309

    Totally agree!

    But I think it must include : "Learn Transaction isolation levels/SQLServer Locking behaviour".

    Maybe as subarticle for "Tuning".

    You may have well-tuned stored procs that work fast only in test environment, but in production they locks each other.

  • December 1, 2006 at 7:11 pm

    #675315

    great article. I've sent a note to my developers and DBAs to ensure they all read it.

  • December 2, 2006 at 9:32 am

    #675337

    Thanks for the article. I think that it is a good baseline to go by.

  • April 12, 2007 at 10:33 pm

    #700272

    Hello, I thisk this is a great article, it is clear, nice to read and very usefull.

    I believe that the most difficult thing is to learn to understand correctly the excecution plans, DBAs should read about this topic.

    Thank you.

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