I’m borrowing from Andy Leonard (blog | twitter) who says all the time, “Good engineers are lazy.”
If you’re thinking, “Why would I want (to be) a lazy DBA?” let me explain. There’s a lot to be said for hard work. However, have you ever seen someone who is always busy but seems to get very little done? Hard work, in and of itself, isn’t the goal. The goal is to get things done. This is where laziness comes in.
If I have to repeat a task, I should look at automating it. I don’t want to have to repeat those steps each time. I want to be lazy. For instance, as an operational person, there are a lot of things I need to review within my production environment on a periodic basis to ensure my systems are running as they should. Case in point: ensuring the SQL Server drives don’t run out of free space. This is something that I should monitor regularly (daily). There are different ways I could handle this:
- I could log on to each server and check each drive.
- I could use a tool like TreeSize to hit the drives one by one.
- I could automate the checks which results in a report in my inbox.
I prefer the last option. If I’m smart, I’ll even schedule it to run so it’s ready for me when I get in each morning. But why stop there? I could not only automate gathering the data, but also automate some of the analysis. Let’s say I set thresholds and the automation bubbles up anything crossing a threshold to the top of my report, meaning the most important data gets seen first. I don’t want to just be lazy, I want to be very lazy. By being this lazy and automating, I free up the one resource I can never get more of: time.
What can you automate? Anything and everything you can successfully automate frees up time for you to spend tackling other things. The more your organization sees and understands that you do, the more valuable you are. If you are in IT but don’t happen to be a DBA, this is still a solid approach. Let me generalize and say being a lazy IT pro is being a good IT pro.
