February 15, 2018 at 9:35 am
Is that subject good enough click bait? 🙂
My title is a "Database Administrator" but I loosely use that title because I'm a newbie. My background from 2005-2017 has been Desktop, Network and System Admin / Client Server work. I'm here because of a prior work with one of the managers. They called me up asking if I wanted a new line of work that was they new would be a new field of IT for me. I gladly accepted as my other '5 year mission' was winding down.
I am in a "small" Physician Hospital Organization. We have several thousand physicians. We are just getting into data analytics to improve care and meet federal guidelines/goals. There was a two person analytics team prior to me joining and they are no longer here for various reasons. One of the main reasons, in my opinion, was communication with the previous DBA, who was a good DBA. I was brought on as a contractor to document what the previous DBA was doing right before they left. It was extremely challenging; communication was difficult at times. I got what I could and was able to continue their work to meet deadlines that are each month.
We have an SQL Server in Microsoft Azure. That's it. I'm fully confident in my ability to backup and restore DBs as needed. I can install SQL Server as well (did it for 5 years, several hundred times). The querying side of SQL is what is new to me. I have picked up enough with a book I bought, Google, this site, etc, to get the job done and now I'm working on improving how we do things. We take in a lot of data from sources, and naturally, nothing ever comes in the same way. Spreadsheets, Tab Files, CSV Files, etc, etc. It's kind of annoying at times when nothing comes in a consistent form or just ridiculous forms that are a challenge to just blindly import into SQL. Some days I could spend a half hour just reformatting something so it will import cleanly into SQL. I have made requests of vendors to redo their data files to be more 'import friendly'. I have yet to see any changes made. We don't really store anything on our SQL Server I manage, but I'd like to get to that point. I mostly import, calculate, export query results to Excel, save, send to the recipient, done. I don't know yet the best way to store data and repeatedly insert data into an existing table. I'll get there, though. Many times I am asked for specific data from a source and I just write a quick select statement to get just what they want, export the query results to Excel, send, done.
We have monthly reports the office needs that were manually done with Excel and I'm moving them to SQL. They can be done much faster this way. I'd like to get it to a point where the end requester can go to SSRS and view it and export to Excel if they want.
How did others start in their DBA role? Was it similar? Different?
-Mark
MSSQL 2019 Standard, Azure Hosted. Techie/Sysadmin by trade; Three years as a "DBA" now.
February 15, 2018 at 12:53 pm
I almost first got my start as a DBA at a company looking to upsize from FoxBase for UNIX and FoxPro for DOS to Oracle in the mid 90's, they sent me to all kinds of training, then cancelled the project before we even really began. Of course I got my real first start as a DBA at my next company looking to upsize from Borland InterBase to Oracle. I was technically called a Siebel system administrator at another job, but a lot of what I was doing was DBA type work. At the same company but different position was where I first got into SQL Server in the early 2000's, doing ETL work of vendor product catalogs into a database for our website. I can sympathize with the always receiving data in non-standard formats. I remember trying to wrestle with a giant XML file from IBM that they were trying to send to us using a HTTP POST which was almost always coming through incomplete. I also know that trying to figure out a predecessor's setup and processes can be a tough task, I've been there both as a consultant and as in house employee. Where I'm at now I spent most of the first 3 months just trying to get things to a point where I could move forward and not spend most of my day putting out fires. I've been here over 7 years now though and tamed a lot of the wild landscape here.
February 19, 2018 at 4:42 am
My experience is very different and very similar. I came into the DBA role through development and I'm a classic accidental DBA. The struggle is to both define your role and ensure that within that definition you're acting in the best interests of the organization, not simply doing what you've been told (although that's sometimes your only option). To a degree, they're counting on you to be able to bring them the important questions that need asking for a broader strategic understanding of data, protection, privacy, availability, etc. because you're the subject matter expert (whether you consider yourself that or not). Fight through the imposter syndrome that is natural here and do what you can. Just try to avoid getting to stuck in the weeds of "This bloody import has a comma in the wrong place" kind of thing. A lot of that comes with the job, but it shouldn't define the job.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
February 22, 2018 at 2:26 pm
It's interesting to me to hear how other people start, so I'll do my part to keep this thread alive...
I had zero intention of being a DBA, but about 11 years ago I spontaneously asked the head of the data services department where I was working if I could come in on my off days and shadow someone because I wasn't learning anything in the position I had in the company's NOC. To my surprise, I was offered a Junior spot on the DBA team and my boss told me I'd be stupid to not take it, so I transfered over. I was very fortunate in that the team already had 5 really smart DBAs on it and everyone that made up the data services department (like... everyone... the devs, the architect, the other DBAs, and the head of the department) were kind enough to guide me and mentor me as I needed it. Most of that initial time was fielding low-hanging fruit, sitting with the Senior guys during fires, and working on long-term low-impact projects that I could experiment and learn with.
Finding yourself in a position where you're picking up after someone and trying to make sense of what was going on before you sucks. Always. My last gig, I was hired as the second DBA in the group and the only documentation/inventory/standards/etc existed in the head of the existing DBA, so at least I had a place to start. My current spot I came in after the only DBA left and found a situation much like the previous spot in terms of nothing being written down with the bonus that much of what was written down was out of date by months if not years and a good bit of the documentation was no more than "X is broken, but I'm waiting on Y to happen so I can fix it." Anyway, I'd hate to have to do it as a first-time-DBA, so hats off to you, seriously.
We've got really good and thorough devs where I'm at right now, so I don't get sucked into optimization too often and when I do it's either something really fun and challenging or it's something ridiculously easy that just needed a second pair of eyes to spot. A lot of my daily stuff is standard administrative things like ensuring backups and security audits, code deployments, and documentation. But since I'm the only DBA I'm also in charge of defining policies surrounding the environments, provisioning new servers, and acting as an operations-focused SME for whatever projects are going on.
Welcome to it 🙂
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