Steve Jones from Redgate and SQLServerCentral.com recently put out an interesting challenge: A day in the life of a DBA. The thought is that there is not a lot of discussion around what IT professionals and DBA’s in general do day to day. For the upcoming generation there is a large gap of knowledge out there for them to make decisions on for their career paths. So while my day to day does not have much excitement, I was curious about the answer to this question myself.
See my Day 1 post to get caught up.
My second day of tracking tasks is summarized below. A little more structured time today with less “emergency” issues that needed to be addressed.
Beginning of the Day:
- For the past two months I have been listening to the audio book version of The Phoenix Project on my commute to work. This book is so good and it is amazing how it mirrors my company down to every detail. I am almost to the end and it has taught me so much.
- Got to the office around 6:00 AM.
- I proceeded to check e-mails and any alerts that needed attention from overnight.
- Looked at our ticket queue and found nothing new to work on.
- The previous day I had enabled a SQL Agent Job to run my new restore validation test process. I did some analysis on the logs to see if everything happened as expected.
- The process was still running with a couple servers to go
- I found one database failed to restore so I did some additional checking in to that issue
- Two weeks ago we attended a Redis conference that was hosted in town. The PowerPoint slides and sample code was sent out by the organizers. I took some time this morning to read through the slides and test out the code.
- I was not really in a mindset to focus on anything that needed thought so I took an extended Internet break and breakfast around 7:30 AM.
- At 8:30 AM, we noticed on one of our dashboards that CPU doubled on one of our production servers. After looking in to it we found that a deployment at 9:00 PM the night before had deleted a recently added index. So when the load on the server started to pickup the SP the index was put in to help started using a ton extra CPU. So we added it back and CPU plummeted. I then followed up with our SQL development lead to check in to why the TFS build removed our index. We are supposed to have settings in place to not remove objects during deployments.
- Did some more data review of the network traffic capture done in previous weeks.
- I completed a GitHub PR for the PowerShell.org group for the books in the DevOps Collective. Recently Don Jones put out an invitation to help improve their e-books. The short of it is they converted the books from Word to Markdown and some formatting and special characters get inserted. So he is seeking assistance in proofreading the books. This is something I enjoy and spelling, punctuation and grammar issues just seem to jump off the page at me. So I figured this would be a quick and easy way to give back. I started with the Why PowerShell? book. I look forward to doing another one in the future.
Middle of the Day:
- Internet break and lunch at 11:30 PM.
- A new environment was built for a new product we recently launched. So for the SQL Servers in our new Performance environment I wanted to validate that all configurations were ready and we could turn the server over to our release management department for the initial code deployment.
- Another set of servers recently deployed and handed over to us cannot be connected to from our admin server. All of our configurations and monitoring come from this admin server. Had to get in touch with the NetOps team again to try and figure out why this connectivity was not in place.
End of the Day:
- I am looking to start some consulting work on the side. I had an idea to use on my website to point people to so I did some research and started doing some testing.
- Got a tip from my dbatools homie Chrissy LeMaire about a DevOps book that she thought I might enjoy. Accelerate – The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
- Purchased the Audio book from Amazon and will see when I can fit it in to start.
- Time to check end of the day e-mails and cleanup the Trello board.
Conclusion:
That wraps up Day 2 of a day in the life. Tomorrow is Friday the 13th and a full moon. Hope that is not a sign!!!
