It’s the end of december 2018 when one of our project leaders walks up to me and asks if i’d like to do some DBA work for one of our clients. Sounds good to me so we pick a date, january 11th of 2019 and there we go!
Yesterday was the day. The day before we had the annual kick off session in a very expensive concrete oval with a rectangular piece of grass in the middle. The grass is surrounded by very expensive seats that are really bad for your back and seem to be made for dwarfs. The kick off was nice but very crowded and the drive to the hotel was a good way to calm my mind and reset to fun things. Main question was, what could i expect? The truth was, i had no idea.
So when i walked in, my paper was blank. After a very warm welcome and coffee the IT guy started talking about their IT environment, the use cases, the issues, the planned migration and the lack of time he has to do everything. So that’s where i’m coming in. Not only to help out with the day to day issues, but also to help design the new clusters, implement some form of monitoring and try to tune the different servers so they will run more smoothly.
To get to grips with the environment, i want to create a schema of all the servers, clusters and databases. Just to get an overview of what i’m dealing with. Next, i want to find out what the day to day issues are, what are users complaining about and where are some quick fixes or easy wins. Yes, in the first run i’m going for the low hanging fruit. Not to show off how brilliant i am (because i’m not) but to send a signal to the business.
Hi, we’re here to take your issues seriously and we want to help you. This is our first step. Let us know what you think!
On the longer run i’ll get involved in the designing phase, but my feeling is that i can only work that out with experience of the environment, the issues, the business cases and most important, the available budget. SQL Server Enterprise sounds really cool, but do you really need all those features? Or can you work with the Standard edition license. It saves money.
It’s my first full on DBA assignment, usually i’m working from the ETL side and try and let the database behave. Now i’m focussing on the database alone and it’s an OLTP system. So many changes, so much to learn, so much fun!
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