Day 3 of 4 – My life as a Production DBA (Technical Lead)3 min read

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 and Day 2 post to get caught up on the daily adventure.

The start of my third day began super early because of this little guy.  He decided 4:00 AM was a good time to wake up on Friday the 13th.  While I am an early riser I do enjoy sleeping until at least 5:00 AM on workdays. So this day I played with him until about 5:30 AM when I headed to the office.

Beginning of the Day:
  • Did a quick check on e-mails and any alerts that needed attention.  Luckily nothing was needed at that time.
  • I decided to take a few minutes to cleanup some data in an IT database.  We are currently transitioning versions of a remote management tool VisionApp from version 2012 to version 2017. The issue is we have old data in the 2012 database that is used for a couple reports I had written that compare data on the old version so my reports were starting to show some out-dated info.
  • The infrastructure team reached out about hardware capacity for the request for a new server I had put in earlier in the week.  We are migrating a SQL 2008 R2 server to SQL 2016 and it uses significant hardware resources.  They were questioning the need for so much resources.  They do not have a lot of capacity to have duplicate boxes online for long.  After discussions we decided to have the new box at half capacity until the migration was fully underway.
  • Watched a cool webinar on Azure / OpenShift / Kubernetes / Containers and how an AG could be orchestrated from scratch and then a node be deleted and added back with no human intervention with as little as 6 ping losses.  I was amazed and know I need to increase my effort to learn these technologies.
  • Internet break around 8:30 AM and chugged a protein drink since I did not have breakfast.
  • My desk becomes the center of attention it feels like this morning. A lot of impromptu stop buys to discuss various topics.
    • More network talk about connectivity from our main Admin server talking to some of the new servers
    • Found some strange data in our main Admin database that was causing some metrics and reporting to be off a little
    • While doing data cleanup found some other data in our Admin database that needed some standards applied
Middle of the Day:
  • Internet break and lunch time around 12:00 PM.
  • During lunch I watched a recorded PASS session on how to install 80 SQL Servers fast by Anthony Nocentino.
    • Afterwards I started setting up an Azure Test lab to test some of his work with DSC.
  • After lunch I got invited to an impromptu training session on Chef by our DevOps team leader.
    • I was given access to our Chef environment and pointed to the CookBook used to build and configure SQL Servers.
  • The meeting to discuss the network traffic capture was interesting to say the least.  I love networking!!!
End of the Day:
  • I headed home early because our monthly development patching was starting at 9:00 PM.  We are deploying SQL 2016 SP2 CU1 to our development servers this month.
Conclusion:

Day 3 is in the books and not too much chaos or turmoil caused by Friday the 13th!!!

 

 

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