August 27, 2005 at 9:18 am
As I've (quietly) been exploring other possibilities for a job as a DBA, I find the really interesting, and high paying, jobs want experience with clustering or VLDBs. In my current job, we don't run any clusters and our DB is not very large, about 5 GB.
Any suggestions how I can either get some experience using clustering and/or VLDBs, or prove that I know how to do that (MCDBA and MCSE), so I can get be considered for a more demanding, exciting job?
So long, and thanks for all the fish,
Russell Shilling, MCDBA, MCSA 2K3, MCSE 2K3
August 30, 2005 at 7:07 am
The developer edition of SQL Server 2000 supports clustering. If your company hasn't provided you with a copy, buy one, they're very inexpensive. For a robust production system you need two identical systems for a cluster, but for testing/development purposes you can often make two different machines work in a cluster. So grab a couple of old machines or some new machines that haven't been put into production yet and set them up in a cluster. You'll need some extra NICs and drives too. Find some best practice documents (for both Windows and SQL clustering) and see what happens on the cluster with and without the best practices. Test failovers, replacing drives (beware of drive signatures), changing IP addresses and domains, etc.
For the VLDB, read up on the theories. If you can find the disk space, take a copy of your largest db and put it on a test system. Use DTS or BCP to double your existing data (create a duplicate set of tables with a different owner or a slightly different name and insert the data from the original tables. Repeat until you have enough data to make you comfortable. See how it affects your everyday DBA activities, how you have to change backup strategies, configuration settings, autogrow, etc.
Cindy Gross
http://cindygross.tripod.com
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