Today I am excited to join in with my #sqlfamily and participate in this months #tsql2day throw down. This month Erin Stellato is the king pin and her topic is “A day in the Life.” This gives me a great opportunity to explain a day in the life of a DBA who works for a company who provides DBA services remotely. A typical day has me working on several projects or problems with several clients. One of the things I enjoy about my job is that each day has a new set of challenges. The following are the highlights of my work day on Wednesday, July 11th.
Backups instead of Coffee..
You might start your morning with a cup of coffee but I got to start my day with working with a new client going over an very important issue. We noticed holes in a clients backup maintenance plan so I got to work with them to correct those holes. I know this isn’t the sexiest task out there for DBA’s but making sure that you can recover is one of the most important tasks for a DBA.
Configuring A Cluster to improve High Availability.
Implementing a cluster usually gives you higher availability for your databases but you might not be getting the highest availability possible from how you configured your cluster. Today, I reviewed a four node cluster and found a few flaws that limit the availability of the cluster. To summarize here are some of my findings. The cluster was running in node majority instead of node and disk majority. Instances of SQL Server were not added on all the nodes. The preferred nodes and possible owners were not configured correctly. I look forward to doing another blog post at a later date going over each of these settings.
Troubleshooting Version Store
Today, I got to work with another team mate to help troubleshoot why the version store was filling the tempdb database and causing slowness with the clients application. This gave me an opportunity to go learn more about what all is used by the version store. Noticing that the client used RCSI for their main database we were able to use the Performance Data Warehouse to find a massive update statement that did more writes than expected which caused the growth problems with tempdb.
Assessment review with Client
One thing I enjoy about my job is going over assessments with a client. This usually gives me an opportunity to share some knowledge about how the database engine works. I also gave some recommendations that can be used to improve their performance and how to bring their server up to speed with our best practices.
Favorite Part of the Day!
Every day I get to eat lunch. I try to make sure I have a lunch date with #babybeluga Gregory my one year old son. This is by far my favorite part of the day and it reminds me why I love working from home.
Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed my blog post on A Day in the Life. I look forward to seeing the recap of how everyone else in the SQL Community spent there day.
