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DBAs whats your daily routine? and Project management?

SQL Server Administration
#1

Heya! Long time lurker but new poster here....

I miraculously landed a DBA gig at a small bank (credit union) and so far I've been babysitting Automic jobs (report, data extract, FTP uploader job scheduler) while mentored by a well meaning but very scattered database administrator. I want to make a good impression because thus far in my career I've been mainly an application support analyst with an emphasis on database interaction and much earlier in my life I was a DBA for QA environment test floor so no production DB experience. Anyways back to the point, here's my daily routine so far. The RBDMS is MS SQL Server and Oracle .

  • Verifying RMAN backups and syncs were successfully from the night before
  • Check Error logs for obvious errors and chase down rogue logins
  • Run a query to check database unused file size and logging the results to build a capacity trend
  • Monitor our job scheduler like a hawk

Question #1 Any other suggestions for my routine above?

Question #2 Is about project management

I've been here almost 3 weeks and it sounds like the place could use a good tracking system for coordinating maintenance, patching, and server updates. What system are you all using? Some kind of Agile setup? Crazy big Excel spreadsheets? A team of project managers?

Ty in advance hive mind!

#2

Congrats on the new gig!

(very scattered database administrator. Yeah, that's what he/she said about you too :slight_smile: , remember technology is a just a tool, it comes and goes, people stay above all else respect people and collaborate with them.)

  1. coffee in my robe (working from home)
  2. I use trello to keep track of my work. Create tasks
  3. Inventory of all of your sql servers and versions/patches. Could you consolidate
  4. Do you have a dev/qa/prod instances? do you need one
  5. Never/ever deploy to prod something you have not tested in pre prod
  6. backups and verify backups by restoring them in pre-prod
  7. Performance analysis
  8. Since you are a bank, is everything secure. what kind of uses have access to prod environment. Next audit you could be looking for a new job
    etc

I avoid daily routines by automating things. minimize daily routines by automation.

plenty more to list

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#3

C) Instead, capture all automatic file extensions, i.e., email them to yourself. They are provided by the default trace. I sometimes also log them to a table of my own, sometimes not.

D) Instead, do job unsuccessful notifications: send an email/other to relevant people -- to yourself if no one is applicable -- of any job for which at least one step did not complete successfully. I do not log these to a separate table, but the proc that does the notifications has parameters that allow it to be selectively re-run if needed

#1 Review the hardest-hitting queries. See if there's anything (relatively) easy you can do to improve their performance. The single biggest gain is from changing clustered indexes to be on the very best columns, but that does take specific expertise to do.

#2 How to track will usually be dictated by in-house practices. Use whatever method your shop uses for managing such things.

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#4

Thank you! There's always more to list I'm sure this is a great list for me to use.
I also use Trello and love it.