October 27, 2012 at 5:05 am
Developer, originally in Fortran, Cobol and RPG (I go back a few years), eventually migrated to Office/VBA, recently to Access/Sql Server. Accidental and unintentional DBA, along with still being a developer, hardware maintainer, operator and generally chief cook and bottle washer. I am the -only- IT person in the shop, so I do everything. There are two servers, one running a web site, the other our internal databases. One instance of SQL Server Express 2008 R2 on each, one database on the web server, seven on the internal one. 150MB for largest database, others much smaller, but growing. Especially with all the Access/SQ Server development, far too much for me to handle properly, but it beats being bored.
October 28, 2012 at 9:31 am
Catching up on emails and I saw this editorial. My last post we had 3 servers and about 15 databases, and about a year ago I took a new job. At the interview I was told there were 20 instances with 50 databases. I am now managing 88 instances and over 1200 databases. It has been challenging, but a lot of fun as well, it has certainly accelerated my learning and I have learnt power shell to manage my time, otherwise I would be overwhelmed.
Now for some consolidation...
October 28, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Started off as an accidental DBA and now turned it out to be a career - absolutely love it!
I look after approx 25 x SQL Servers
October 7, 2016 at 1:57 am
Apparently I'm the in-house DBA for 5 servers (out of a total of 88 instances). Biggest database is around 300GB (so far) and growing.
There isn't an "official" DBA in this place and, like someone else already posted, my day-job is a developer but it's amazing how priorities change when something goes bang.
I'm trying to get them to hire a DBA (i.e. give me a new job) as 99% of the staff that currently "manage" the servers haven't got a clue.
October 7, 2016 at 5:46 am
5 SQL DBAs for
~30 production instances from 2008 to 2014 (mainly 2012)
~25 pre-prod
~10 QA
~45 test/sandbox/dev
~1800 DB up to 2TB (total ~70Tb)
Windows clustered instances, Availability Groups, Transactional replication, log shipping, mirroring, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, SAP, Sharepoint, Biztalk ...
we mainly use custom alerting/monitoring based on SQLAgent, SQL alerts, SQL policies, SSRS ...
we want to buy a tool to centralise/standardize monitoring/alerting/analysing for all our servers but for the moment we dont find the one suits to us 😀
October 7, 2016 at 7:05 am
How many databases does each DBA in your organization manage?
Ha! That's a trick question.
If you had asked how many database servers, then I could give you a total number with a +/- margin of error of 10. However, I'm sure that a developer created a new database (in an existing server) last week that we havn't heard about yet and may not know about until it time for deployment. There are also more than a handful of ISV database applications which in concept are supported by the vendor, but for which the DBA can be called upon to troubleshoot on occasion.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
October 7, 2016 at 7:52 am
None.
Phew.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
October 7, 2016 at 8:08 am
In production the service level is probably the driving factor for our attention.
412-977-3526 call/text
October 7, 2016 at 8:33 am
That is a good question. Where I work we have 23 live SQL Instances, 51 test/development instances that are not always up (due to disk space constraints mostly) and in those I believe it is roughly 69 live Databases with 153 test/dev databases. Test isn't always up is what I meant. If live wasn't always up, we'd have other problems. The live ones all reside on 3 physical boxes and the test ones reside on 3 different physical boxes and we have failover set up via DxEnterprise (not advertising them, but it is a pretty sweet tool).
As for disk space, Live has 2.799 TB of disk allocated to it, with roughly 70% of that being used by the SQL instances and test has roughly 4.12 TB of disk with about 90% of that being used by the SQL instances.
I never really thought much about those numbers until now though. We have our shop mostly automated with very little manual intervention that the DBA's (ie me) need to do. We technically have 3 DBA's but I do most of the DBA realated work.
On top of DBA work though, all of our DBA's are also developers. I am the only one with the official DBA title at my company but I am also a developer.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
October 7, 2016 at 9:00 am
I love it when I get a notification about a thread I posed in 4 years ago!
Miss SQL Server so much! :crying:
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It takes a minimal capacity for rational thought to see that the corporate 'free press' is a structurally irrational and biased, and extremely violent, system of elite propaganda.
David Edwards - Media lens[/url]
Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall.
Howard Zinn
October 7, 2016 at 10:30 am
Abu Dina (10/7/2016)
I love it when I get a notification about a thread I posed in 4 years ago!Miss SQL Server so much! :crying:
Geeze. Sorry about that. Didn't realize it was such an old post, but saw it in todays daily email.
I imagine we are spamming a lot of people... I see 6 of us read the email today and responded.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
October 7, 2016 at 10:34 am
bmg002 (10/7/2016)
Abu Dina (10/7/2016)
I love it when I get a notification about a thread I posed in 4 years ago!Miss SQL Server so much! :crying:
Geeze. Sorry about that. Didn't realize it was such an old post, but saw it in todays daily email.
I imagine we are spamming a lot of people... I see 6 of us read the email today and responded.
Haha.. no worries it just made me realise how much I miss using SQL Server.
One day I will get back to doing what I really love doing.
---------------------------------------------------------
It takes a minimal capacity for rational thought to see that the corporate 'free press' is a structurally irrational and biased, and extremely violent, system of elite propaganda.
David Edwards - Media lens[/url]
Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall.
Howard Zinn
October 7, 2016 at 10:58 am
Still a relevant topic, even if the original question is old. Stuff like this resurfaces regularly, as new people enter the profession and run across older discussion threads in the archives.
October 7, 2016 at 11:50 am
Steve: Hi - Thanks for writing this editorial - even though it's a few years old, it is still very relevant!
And Happy Vacation Friday too!
My humble beginnings in the SQL DBA world were somewhat similar to yours it seems - working as a "Site Manager" managing one major database system for one area office in a large organization, as well as procuring and setting up user hardware (PCs when they were first introduced, prior to that, dumb terminals), the server hardware, and the networking and routing hardware and services.
After some time, we started merging the area offices into Regional offices and widened our networks to include them. At one point I managed fifty four systems strung out across the states, then some consolidation and it was thirty-three - but larger systems - and now we're working a project to roll all the data into ten systems. I'm not sure if ten systems or thirty or fifty-four are easier to manage - you know, once it's all set up and automated it kind of runs itself, just be on the look-out for issues and make sure to read the back-up reports and such, but it's certainly less confusing to the operator to have fewer systems!
But the spin is, that although there are fewer systems, there are more users and the systems are much larger - having grown from a half gig generally or so to where most of them now are 70 gigs or bigger. We also discovered that what worked well when there were a few score users on a system, once that jumped up to a couple hundred users, we found out which queries and SPs were dogs and which ones worked well! Spent a month reading up on "tuning" and undoing and re-doing what the developers, when they originally developed the system late last century, had written, in order to make the SPs more efficient and cut down on locks!
And talk about automating things! Again, without being able to schedule stuff and automate procedures, this would be a crazy place to work! It still is since I'm pretty much the one of three in our organization that knows anything about SQL - the other two are developers - but I'm assigned in a particular spot where it's my de-facto job - sort of the 'lead' DBA - sort of the "only" DBA! While the other two and one more bona fide developer are developing software (MVVM stuff) I pretty much take care of the operations side of our SQL systems.
When I was younger (and more highly motivated to learn the stuff!) I would read a lot and get into places like SQL Server Central and download the scripts and play with them, and even got the maintenance plan scripts from Ola and learned a lot about maintenance plans and modified them to suit our needs a bit.
Now, looking at retirement and getting out of the game, the new big problem is that there is no one following on. The challenge is to find others that are motivated to learn and excel, identify them early in their career (it takes years to learn this SQL stuff well! Agreed?) and move them in and get them trained and hope they'll stay. With a bit of lucky prognostication and having the stars lined up - and providing a decent salary too - we might be able to find someone, get them trained, and get them into production before I get outta here! Now that'd be a trick if that could be pulled off!
But in keeping with your theme - accidents happen! In my case, it was a good one! "The Accidental DBA" has been my career since - oh no, let's not go back that far! Suffice it to say that the first machine I ever used in a production environment had eight inch floppies! One "data" disk and one "forms" disk! When I learned that dude and started to automate the work-load, someone saw the light and put me in charge of office "automation" - including the copier! Our first laser printer weighed in at over 300 pounds! And I don't even think they used the word "IT" back in those days either!
So, let accidents happen - as long as they're good ones! And be careful, because anyone could accidentally have a DBA career one day without even realizing it!
October 10, 2016 at 3:10 am
Abu Dina (10/7/2016)
I love it when I get a notification about a thread I posed in 4 years ago!...
Vogue!!!
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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