A guest editorial by Brad McGehee

While I was at TechEd this past month, I attended a session called. “A Day in the Life of the DBA.” It was presented by Microsoft SQL Server Program Manager Buck Woody. You can find his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/buckwoody/. The goal of the presentation was to show DBAs how they could save an hour out of each working day by taking advantage of some of the new features in SQL Server 2008.

Buck is a great speaker and likes to joke around a lot during his presentations. He started his presentation by offering three, tongue-in-check suggestions how DBAs can save time every day, before jumping into his actual presentation. While Buck intended for these three suggestions to be humorous, they really struck a chord with me, because I had employed all three suggestions in my previous life as a production DBA. Here were his three suggestions.

• “Enter into your office using the back door so that nobody can see come in, thus preventing them from asking you questions, or making requests for your time.” In my previous job, I did just this. I had the option of entering the building one of two ways: through the front door, where I had to walk by a huge number of offices, or to enter through a side door where nobody saw me. I always took the side door. This can be a great strategy because you can get directly to work without any distractions. Almost without fail, if I walked down the main hallway where most of the offices were, somebody would stop me and get me off on some tangent and, in most cases, not allowing me to focus on what was really important, which was proactively managing my SQL Servers.
• “Once you sneak into the office unseen, take a quick trip to the coffee pot so you can get the fresh coffee.” I am not a coffee drinker, but once I got into the office, I often snuck into the coffee area to check for fresh doughnuts. I had to be quick, though, because if I waited too long, they were all gone. So most of my mornings got started with a sugar rush instead of Buck’s caffeine rush.
• “After getting your coffee, and then sitting back down at your desk, immediately check the server logs for any possible problems, and resolve them as necessary, all before you check your e-mail. Once all the problems are solved, then check your e-mail. This way, if you get an e-mail from your manager asking you to fix a problem that occurred over night, you can immediately shoot back an e-mail saying that you have already taken care of the problem, making you look like a hero.” While I may not have always checked my logs before reading my e-mail, one of the very first things I did every morning was to review all of my servers, looking for any potential problems. Because I was very proactive in my SQL Server management, rarely did any problems ever arise that came to the attention of management. In fact, I rarely ever saw my manager. As long as I keep my servers up and running, we had very little reason even to speak.

So, what do you think of Buck’s suggestions? Do they come to you naturally, as they did me? Or perhaps you haven’t even given these strategies any thought? In either case, do you have any suggestions for DBAs on how they can better manage their time? If so, please share them with us.

Brad M. Mcgehee