For years Russ Thomas (b/t) has done a Monthly DBA Challenge and in fact I’ve used it as insperation a number of blog posts myself. Here is part of his description of it:
Often the task is what I consider a low frequency / high liability event – something the typical DBA might only do once or twice in their career, but if called upon would be highly critical to the business.
For example (and one used by Russ in a presentation I saw once) let’s say that the drive that holds tempdb for your instance is gone. Someone made a change on the SAN and poof. Gone. So what do you do? How do you fix it? Do you panic? Or, just maybe, you’ve tried it before. You may not remember exactly what to do, but you know it can be done. A quick bit of memory searching (or as I call my memory Google) and off you go. Also likely the challenge is just a suggestion to push you to try something new.
Anyway, to make a long story short (Too late!) Russ has decided to retire the challenge and asked if anyone wanted to take it over. So, you guessed it, I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to put my own spin on it though and it’s going to be SQL Homework. Get it? It fits the theme? Come on! It’s pretty obvious. Right? I’m going to be starting with basic but important tasks and I’ll do my best to build over time.
So here is your homework for July!
- Take a full backup of a database
- Use that backup to restore to an alternate location
- Run a query against that alternate location to make sure everything is working correctly
Here is how the grading will go
- A – You do everything using T-SQL without any form of help.
- B – You get it done using T-SQL (If you needed a lot of help you might save the script somewhere for the future).
- C – You got it done. Maybe using the GUI, maybe using a 3rd party tool. But you got it done!
- D – You tried. Maybe you didn’t get it all done, but you made the effort.
- F – You didn’t even give it 5 minutes it would take to try.
Filed under: Backups, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Homework, SQLServerPedia Syndication Tagged: backups, microsoft sql server, SQL Homework 
