What are the daily DBA administrator tasks

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What are the daily DBA administrator tasks

zakariye88

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August 26, 2010 at 2:24 pm

#226942

I have been IT field more than 10 years now -- mostly Networking and Server administration (both Linux and Microsoft servers). I am planning to become SQL administrator. I have some previous experience on SQL, ORACLE database -- just installing, running some SQL commands, using Visual studio to created web application through SQL express database, but is very limited to home experments only, so I do not have tangible experience on real word SQL administration. My question is what are daily tasks for SQL server administrators?
I appreciated for you input and guidance.
Thanks Zak

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Shawn Melton SSC-Insane Points: 24685 More actions · Answer 1

Check this site.[/url] Then buy the book. It will give you a good headstart.

You are going to have to obtain some experience before jumping into an dedicated DBA position. Your best option with the SA experience you have is find one that has SA responsibilities but also includes supporting a large number of SQL Servers (or database OS of your preference).

Shawn Melton
Twitter: @wsmelton
Blog: wsmelton.github.com
Github: wsmelton

zakariye88 Valued Member Points: 50 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks Shawn. I will definitely look into this book.

crazy4sql SSCoach Points: 19590 More actions · Answer 3

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Database+Administration/62480/

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Ashish

PaulB-TheOneAndOnly SSC Guru Points: 66772 More actions · Answer 4

zakariye88 (8/26/2010)
I have been IT field more than 10 years now -- mostly Networking and Server administration (both Linux and Microsoft servers). I am planning to become SQL administrator. I have some previous experience on SQL, ORACLE database -- just installing, running some SQL commands, using Visual studio to created web application through SQL express database, but is very limited to home experments only, so I do not have tangible experience on real word SQL administration. My question is what are daily tasks for SQL server administrators?

DBAs have the same responsibilities no matter the RDBMS of choice, in short DBAs are responsible for:

- Database integrity

- Database recoverability

- Database performance

The basic tasks pointing to achieve such objectives are:

- Check backup logs

- Check RDBMS logs

- Check O/S logs

- Check space at both logical and physical level

- Monitor performance

Hope this helps.

_____________________________________
Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.

Grant Fritchey SSC Guru Points: 399278 More actions · Answer 5

Another vote for Tom LaRock's DBA Survivor. Great little book.

Another book about the DBA job is Craig Mullin's "Database Administration." Also worth a read.

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt

Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

Derrick Smith SSChampion Points: 10833 More actions · Answer 6

I manage a bit over 20 servers at my work and to make things easy, I made a centralized reporting page that is automatically updated by sql jobs for every server, and data is then stored into a central Operations DB.

Here are the things on the page:

1) List of every server with (updated every 2 minutes):

- Time last refreshed (highlighted in red if more than 30 seconds overdue)

- Total CPU usage on the server

- CPU Used by SQL

- Page Life Expectancy

- Buffer Cache Hit Ratio

- Number of Blocks

2) List of all jobs across all servers that have failed on their most recent execution - list includes the server name, job name, last run time, and first 200 characters of the error message

3) Replication Latency for all servers and all publications/subscriptions, updated every 5 minutes (automatically insert a tracer token and track the time).

4) All disks across all servers with less than 15% free space

5) Live blocking report of our 3 production servers

I highly suggest you set up your own processes to look for these things, have them report back to your own monitoring database, and put them together in an easy to read front end (asp.net page created with visual web developer express is easy, and free).

Typically if something is wrong on any one of my servers, there will be some indication of it here. I can quickly glance through this page and basically look for anything that's red. It's all of the usual daily checks, done in 5-10 seconds. You can also share this page with developers/QA/etc who might be concerned about performance/job failures, and save them (and you) some time.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004638 More actions · Answer 7

There's a huge amount of info available on this... just Google it. 😉

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

zakariye88 Valued Member Points: 50 More actions · Answer 8

Thank you all. What a great forum! I now know all the information neccessary to assume DBA resposibilities. I appreciated all your inputs and advices.

Much respect, Zak