July 4, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Please advise:
Dream of becoming a DBA is challenging. I am figuring this out these days. I got my MCITP/MCTS in SQL 2008, now what? Companies these days are looking for Mid-Senior Level DBA? My past experience has been in Entry Level IT. I am hoping to land a Junior Level DBA job or even a internship (paid or non-paid), where I can get hands on experience.
Allot of DBA come to this site too get information, I would like to know how did your first job/internship in becoming DBA? We all started somewhere right?
Any input or advise is greatly appreciated it. If you can offer me a internship or Junior Level DBA, God Bless you. You will help to launch my career and my dream 🙂
My email address is: sonny_bhalla@yahoo.com
July 4, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Now this in NOT a quick technique to find a job, but something you might / should investigate for the longer term. Locate your nearest local chapter of PASS "Professional Association for SQL Server" using:
http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters.aspx
Join the local chapter, attend their meetings, meet people as you get to know them, talk to them about entry job opportunities. Frequent sponsors of local meeting are recruiting firms, if one is there talk to them. Most jobs are found not thru employment advertisements, but from a circle of people you know.
July 4, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Thank You Ron, for your input. I greatly appreciate it.
July 5, 2011 at 2:50 am
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2009/04/how-to-get-a-junior-dba-job-part-1/
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
July 5, 2011 at 4:34 am
A lot of DBA's i know started out as developers . Every once in a while there would also be an sysops guy.
Basically networks with DBA's in your company , identitfy the tasks they do periodically and actually work on the tools used in your company.
prove yourself to the DBA's in your company and pretty soon you will be the first person they think of when an opening comes up
July 5, 2011 at 5:22 am
Along with the other good suggestions on this thread, please take the time to read the articles at the link that Gila-Monster posted above. It should be required reading prior to anyone making the decision to become a DBA.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
July 5, 2011 at 6:48 pm
I came from the admin side, having managed a large network.
Getting the job you want is often a matter of working hard, looking for opportunities and taking advantage of them. Work with the product as much as you can, at work or at home, and show someone that you have some talent, and more importantly, the desire to work hard.
July 6, 2011 at 3:46 am
July 6, 2011 at 4:07 am
Jayanth_Kurup (7/6/2011)
Being DBA is a lifestyle choice as well 😀 , stressful work environment esp when things go bad as well as night shifts etc and being the guys who has to bring bad news to Management so be prepared.
Correct.. 🙂
Thanks
July 6, 2011 at 8:17 am
You never worked as a DBA and looking for a junior position? In the meantime you are a MCTS and MCITP?!
How did you do that?? I have around 2 yrs of experience (not much with 2K8 though) and could pass my MCTS few weeks back, and I was JUST above the limit 700 points!! Perhaps that's me who is doing something wrong ..
__________________________
Allzu viel ist ungesund...
July 6, 2011 at 10:20 am
As suggested earlier, attend local SSUG meetings. It's good that you have your certifications, but also read some books that delve more into detail about topics like SQL Server internals, performance opimimization, or data warehousing.
There are some recruiters or IT consulting firms that will exploit your eagerness to get your feet wet by throwing you into the fire, but that won't help either you or the client. Instead try to land a job where you are working as part of a team with other more senior level DBAs. I don't know where you live, but some of the metropolitan areas are hubs for corporate IT headquarters, and you'll have much better luck landing a junior level DBA position there than you would in a smaller town where companies typically have only a minimal IT staff and thus require someone with more experience who can work with minimal supervision.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 6, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Thank You Eric for great feedback. I am St.Louis area.
July 6, 2011 at 9:42 pm
I'm not sure if this will help you any, but it's an article I wrote recently for here. Sorry for the self-plug, but it pretty much was written for someone in your scenario.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Career/73400/
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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October 5, 2011 at 7:30 pm
sonny_bhalla (7/4/2011)
Please advise:Dream of becoming a DBA is challenging. I am figuring this out these days. I got my MCITP/MCTS in SQL 2008, now what? Companies these days are looking for Mid-Senior Level DBA? My past experience has been in Entry Level IT. I am hoping to land a Junior Level DBA job or even a internship (paid or non-paid), where I can get hands on experience.
Allot of DBA come to this site too get information, I would like to know how did your first job/internship in becoming DBA? We all started somewhere right?
Any input or advise is greatly appreciated it. If you can offer me a internship or Junior Level DBA, God Bless you. You will help to launch my career and my dream 🙂
My email address is: sonny_bhalla@yahoo.com
Don't take this personally, but when a resume comes my way with "MCITP/MCTS" and other MS certifications I pass the resume on to the trash barrel.
These days, the more certification people get, the more it seems they have memorized enough of some training manual in order to pass a test, but when the s**t hits the fan they're clueless on how to use all their certifications to fix the problem.
I started with some resistors, capacitors, transistors and a soldering iron. Then I built a few things and broke a bunch of them by trying to make them work with fewer (usually lost or broken) pieces. Then I build my first PC from scratch, installed the OS and learned what the commands did. From there I fixed pcs for a year and a half and learned C and C++ on my own time. From that job I took a windows programming job, even though my only exposure with windows was configuring it the previous year. The key here is that I understood enough about the hardware to know just how Windows HAD to work with it. Two years later I was given an assignment where I had to write a program to do some ETL with Sybase. I immeidately insatlled Sybase on my machine and started screwing around with it. Like it, bought a book on Sybase admin and got a job as a Jr System Engineer where all I did was travel around and installed sybase for our production on client's servers and did 3rd level support when not on the road. Got exposed to SQL while doing the Sybase work and at that time Sybase and SQL were virtually the same. Ditched Sybase and have been working on SQL evern since.
But SQL is a constant learning experince. It changes, and it changes FAST. The only way to keep up is by playing with it and being thrown into the fan along with the s**t when it hits because if you don't know how to fix it at least you understand enough about the system/technology in order to make quick decisions as how and where to start trouble shooting.
My main point is this: You don't have to know how to build a SQL server by hand by soldering transistors to a board and then coding it from scratch, but if you dig it enough to the point to enjoy playing with it as much as you can, you'll know it inside and out, and when you go to an interview for that DBA job available at that awesome company you dream about working at, you'll know the answer and spit it out before they're done asking you the you what is the different between a primary key and a unique clusterted index, or what happens when you try to insert another record into a table where you're already used up all of the possible values in the identity column.
I don't expect that anyone applying to work with/for me know everything I can possibly ask them under the sun about SQL Server, but if you apply for DBA job and you have all of those certifications, you better be prepared to answer some of those basic questions without hesitation. You don't have to know by heart what flag to use to start up the instance in single user mode, but you better be well prepared to explain to me how you start an instance in the command line and use those flags without even blinking your eyes with hesitation.
When I interview for a DBA or SQL developer job, I expect a very deep understanding of the most basic aspects of SQL, especially in the areas they'll be required to work with (replication, maybe CLR, etc), even if it means you'll have to do a quick google search to remember the correct syntax of the many different ways to invoke DBCC WHATEVER.
So there you have it. How I got here and my best advice as to how to be a successful DBA is this: ENJOY working and learning SQL Server as you would your favorite ice cream flavor.
October 5, 2011 at 7:51 pm
mendesm (10/5/2011)
Don't take this personally, but when a resume comes my way with "MCITP/MCTS" and other MS certifications I pass the resume on to the trash barrel.These days, the more certification people get, the more it seems they have memorized enough of some training manual in order to pass a test, but when the s**t hits the fan they're clueless on how to use all their certifications to fix the problem.
I disagree with you. That statement is a major generalization. I am one of those people that don't only study for certifications but I try to understand deeply what I'm studying. And I know a lot of guys who are not experienced but eager to learn as much as I do. I live in a small town that doesn't have big companies and the companies that do exist don't even know what DBA means. That doesn't stop me from trying.
So basically we're all doomed because we are not experienced. But isn't that how everyone starts? Nobody is born a DBA.
And above all, remember: we're all here on the SSC forums to learn and if someone has the courage to come here and express their feelings and he is an MCITP and you reject his resume because of a certification, you maybe be missing a great professional in the future.
No offense intended. But that's all too general to me. 🙂
Best regards,
Best regards,
Andre Guerreiro Neto
Database Analyst
http://www.softplan.com.br
MCITPx1/MCTSx2/MCSE/MCSA
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