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.
Today I am going to conclude and summarize My Life as a Production DBA series. It has been an eye opening assignment and I am glad I went through this process. To see such a warm response from the blog readers, I am still building that audience, but the ones that enjoyed it and reached out to me I truly appreciate the time.
If you want to catch up on the first three posts in the series you can start with Day 1.
Summary of Tasks:
- Ticketing System monitoring – 6
- SQL Admin – 8
- Data Related – 3
- Permissions request – 9
- Security – 4
- Networking – 4
- Emergencies – 1
- Server Builds – 6
- Learning – 8
- Open Source Stuff – 2
While these are the tasks captured, this does not show the planning and other daily admin functions. I cannot stress enough how important I believe it is for keeping your E-Mail inbox clean and organized. I personally just keep active items in my Inbox that are waiting for action or waiting on a response from someone else. This helps me be able to quickly see if I need to follow-up on something that might have fallen off the other persons radar.
I cannot tell you how it makes my skin crawl when I see someone with 10’s of thousands of unread e-mails. How in the world do you know what has happened or needs to be done. If you are getting alerts from a monitoring system, read them or get out of the group that the e-mail is coming to.
Another aspect not tracked are all the Instant Messages, Teams Chats, Slack Channels, etc. And finally, everyone’s favorite; “The Drive By”. When someone decides you did not respond fast enough or that you may not be able to read e-mail and understand. Or they just want to chit-chat. I guess this is all part of working in an office with other people.
Also, I am lucky to have the support of management and the company to build skills and learn new things. This is not something that every company allows and is a blessing when trying to find new ways to do tasks and setup new processes. It helps break up the day and clear your mind of all the requests on my time.
Conclusion:
This exercise was really fun and I hope the folks who made it through all three days got some informative data. This was a pretty tame week since I was not on-call and did not have any major project initiatives going on.
Happy reading!!!
Nice write-up. Cheers for the insight!