How Do You Handle the Stress of Being a DBA?

Posted on by

This is a reprint of my editorial at SQLServerCentral.com. There is a lively discussion at the SSC forum on this topic, or feel free to comment here.

While being a DBA has many benefits, it can also be a job with many stressful drawbacks. Some of them that come to mind include:

  • As the organization’s protector of the data, DBAs often have great responsibility. A careless mistake could potentially cost your organization thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (and your job).
  • Many DBAs don’t work typical 40 hour weeks. Many work weeknights, weekends, and holidays, all without any overtime pay.
  • Getting called at home in the middle of the night or on weekends, and often having to come into the office to fix a problem.
  • While one crisis at a time is enough for anyone, there are often situations where multiple crises occur at the same time, creating a very hectic environment.
  • Getting blamed for problems that are beyond your control, such as the poor performance of a badly-designed, mission-critical application.
  • Being told to do one thing by one manager, but then being told to do something different by another manager.
  • Being assigned a project without the necessary resources and time to complete it successfully.
  • Having developers give you a bad time because you are trying to enforce best practices and to protect the integrity of the organization’s data.
  • As a DBA, you often see a bigger picture of how IT works than others, giving you a great perspective on how to make things better, but only to have your ideas for improvements ignored.
  • And on and on.

While you may not have experience all of these drawbacks, I am sure you have experienced some of them. So my question to you is: What’s the best way to deal with the inevitable stress of being a DBA? Are you the type of individual who thrives on stress, do you just tough it out, do you take action to reduce stress as much as possible, or do you have other ways of relieving stress? Please share with us how you cope with the stress of being a DBA.

Creating the SSC Maintenance Plan: Part 3

Posted on by

Note: This is an in-depth article that exceeds 5,000 words, and provides a case-study of how a maintenance plan could be implemented on a single, plain vanilla, SQL Server instance.

As I have mentioned in previous parts of this article series (part 1, part 2), I act as a consultant DBA for the SQLServerCentral.com (SSC) and Simple-Talk.com (ST) backend databases, and I don’t perform any of the day-to-day tasks. But one of the things I was asked to do was to implement a database maintenance plan for the new, two-node, active/active cluster that has recently gone live. In this third part of this series, I am going to talk about how I created the maintenance plan, and why I made the choices I did.

Continue reading →

What Would You Like to See in a New Book on Indexing?

Posted on by

I am currently in the early stages of writing an outline for a new book on indexing, targeted towards novice DBAs. While this topic has been done to death in hundreds of articles, presentations, and books, I think there is still room for a book that makes the topic easy to read and easy to understand for beginners. The focus on the book would be on the essential (not esoteric) indexing skills that DBAs need to perform their job on a day-to-day basis.

I would really appreciate your advice and feedback on what such a book should include. For example:

  • What part(s) of indexing do you find very easy to understand?
  • What part(s) of indexing do you find the most difficult to understand?
  • What topics do you think I should include in the book that would be of the most help to you?
  • What topics do you think I should not include in the book because they are not helpful for the typical DBA?
  • Can you provide me URL’s of articles on indexing that you think are particularly good, or particularly bad?
  • What’s the best book you have ever read on indexing? What’s the worst book? And why?

If you have any feedback on any of the above topics (you don’t have to answer all of the above question), please post them below. The more feedback I get, the better I will be able to write a book that will best fit the needs for novice DBAs. Once the book is done, it would become freely available as an eBook, just as all my recent books have been.

Free eBook on SQL Server Maintenance Plans Now Available

Posted on by

BRAD_MAINTENENCE_PLANS_135My new eBook, Brad’ Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans is now available as a free, 269 page PDF eBook. The book is designed for part-time or novice DBAs who want to learn how to properly create Maintenance Plans using the tools that come with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in SQL Server 2005/2008.

These two tools include:

  • Maintenance Plan Wizard – a Wizard that steps the user through the process of setting up basic Maintenance Plans, with limited options.
  • Maintenance Plan Designer – a drag-and-drop GUI interface in SSMS that facilitates the design and creation of more flexible, customizable maintenance plans.

Unfortunately, neither tool is especially easy to use or well documented. However, with the guidance I provide in this book, they can become powerful tools in helping the novice DBA to perform critical maintenance tasks, and so help to ensure SQL Server’s performance and availability. In addition to learning how to use these tools you will, along the way, pick up a lot of good, general advice on SQL Server database maintenance. I also tell you when not to use these tools, as there are many cases when it is more appropriate to use T-SQL or PowerShell scripts to perform database maintenance.

If you get a chance to read the book, please post your feedback here. While I spent a lot of time trying to include as much content as I could, I realize that I did not cover every possible way to use these tools, nor cover how they should be used under every possible SQL Server environment.

A paperback version of the book should become available at Amazon.com within the 60 days.

PS: If you haven’t read my blog on A Time and Place for the SQL Server Maintenance Plan Wizard, please do so. It explains why I decided to write this book.