Day to Day Administration
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Hi People,
I am a junior DBA and have been for a while now. Since doing this role, I have never really been trained by a senior or anything, have been on one course about SQL Server 7 but learn most of my knowledge from good sites (this one's the best!). What I find is that I get bored unless I have a particular problem to solve or project to work on and wondered what all you other SQL Server DBA's do on a Day to Day basis in order to look after your databases/servers. I just check they are alright and that there is enough space and all the jobs are fine but its always fine!!
It would be good to hear from you. Thanks for your time.
Meg
Edited by - meghardy on 09/26/2002 09:26:59 AM
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Improve processes, make them run faster. Look for holes in your processes. Automate things that I do. Performance monitoring and tuning if I can get time.
Steve Jones
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Wow. I'd like to have a job where all I had to do was administer...or program/develop...or manage...or train...instead of constantly expected to do it all.
Now that I'm finished with my whining, must say I'm curious what are some of the exact tasks included in "Performance monitoring and tuning." I occasionally look at the processes in EM, but nothing stands out unless there's a lock. Also set up a profiler trace to a table - it's handy when I need to find out exactly what sql statements executed when to get me in a mess.
That should qualify as performance monitoring? As for improving & making run faster - I'm guessing includes indexing properly & rewriting queries to run faster.
Hey, beginners & stressed out IT employees need concrete examples.
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Some of the things I do on a daily basis are...
Check DB's (space/size/growth)
Check Disk Space
Monitor Performance during busy periods (this is because I am after an upgrade of hardware!)
Performance Tuning (Lots of queries/SP's etc that could be improved)
Review Server activity (Scheduled Jobs + we have eMail notifications for slow running jobs etc)
Mostly our server looks after itself so it's a nice setup, but still keep a carefull eye on it...just incase!
One of my main daily tasks at present is to move monitor two servers we are running in parallel following an upgrade.
Clive Strong
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I am constantly seeking ways to improve SPs and Queries. When not monitoring things, I read on sites like this (mostly just this site these days), or read in Books On Line. In between the reading I develop SPs and DTS packages that help me monitor the servers so that I can spend more time learning new things to use to improve our servers more.
I have a DTS package that checks and saves all the hard drive free space in a table and triggers that fire when free space is below required levels. The package also spot checks certain columns for specific values and or row counts and then delivers a report. This gives me a general idea that all is well.
Robert Marda
SQL Server will deliver its data any way you want it
when you give your SQL Programmer enough developing time.
Robert W. Marda
Billing and OSS Specialist - SQL Programmer
MCL Systems -
I've switched roles, but here's basically what I did when I was a full-time DBA:
1) Check logs for security issues
2) Check logs for errors thrown by SQL Server (for instance, if our illustrious developers have coded an integrity violation into their app)
3) View job histories for any of our automated jobs if there were failures and fix and re-run
4) monitor databases (growth, size, etc).
5) monitor system performance (perfmon)
6) code as required
7) code review as required
8) read up on sites like this one
9) read up on security sites like sqlsecurity.com and ngssoftware.com
10) plot the demise of all the developers who cause troubles with the DB
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
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