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Panimu
Starting Member
2 Posts |
 Posted - 2015-03-06 : 12:00:24
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| Imagine for a moment you're starting a new job. You've walked into a medium sized company (say 300 headcount, 50 IT) with about 25-50 servers.What do you do on the first day?In the first week?In the first month?Background: I got promoted to DBA in a company I had a decade experience with so it was a very easy transition. But sometime soon I'll be accepting a new job and it'll be my first time going in cold to an organisation as a DBA so your thoughts would be very valuable to me.Thanks for reading my first post! |
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seshurtz
Starting Member
7 Posts |
Posted - 2015-03-08 : 09:29:42
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Hi Panimu,I think the first day is going to be more about orientation. It's important you ask questions that are intended to give you a holistic view of the environment. Physical vs. Virtual servers, standard practices, security policies, etc. This would also be a good time to go over some pain points the business unit has been experiencing. Often times, I ask this question during the interview process, "Why are you hiring for this position? Have you identified any pain points with your SQL Servers?"Another critical goal should be obtaining business knowledge. How the businesses use the SQL Server's can be a tremendous help. For example, you're looking through indexes at a later time and you notice that there are several that SQL Server is saying are barely used but, because you have business knowledge, you know that several reports are run quarterly or yearly that would use these indexes. Business knowledge can really be a headache saver!!!Once you have become more attuned with the environment, it's important to look over each server and get an idea of any pain points such as backups, security, performance, server settings, maintenance. There are some great scripts out there to help you do this. I, personally, like starting with SP_Blitz. It's a free stored proc from Brent Ozar Unlimited (Note - I would ask if third party scripts are an issue!). They offer some other great scripts as well!http://www.brentozar.com/first-aid/sql-server-downloads/Once you get an idea of each server's "health". Take some baselines of each server using Performance Monitor and some other scripts. Glen Barry has some awesome scripts that come with an excel spreadsheet. These help you analyze different metrics within your SQL Server and are GREAT for base lining. Make sure you save the sp_blitz data too!!!https://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2014/09/17/sql-server-diagnostic-information-queries-for-september-2014/After performing these steps you should know what pain points each server has, what needs improvement, and what is doing well. You then can use this information to make a project outline on what needs to be done. As you make these improvements, take more baselines and put them somewhere for safe keeping. Then, at your annual review, you can transform this data into nice charts you can use to show how you've made improvements to the environment!Hope this helps!  Steve Shurtz, MCPDatabase Administrator |
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Starting somewhere new - first tasks?