A DBA’s first day on the job

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Newbie DBA: Okay, I’m ready to start. Tell me all about your environment!

Current DBA: Well, we’ve got a couple of test boxes, a few QA, and something like 40 production instances. I think most of the production instances are on SQL 2008 R2, but I’m not sure.

Newb: Ah. Okay, so which prod boxes are the important ones?

Curr: Oh, I guess Server3 and Server8 are some of our bigger ones. I’ll have to dig out my list. I put it together like a year or two ago, and a couple of things have changed since then…

Newb: Oh. Well, what do you guys use for backups around here? Third party, or home grown?

Curr: It’s a mix. Some boxes are still on maintenance plans, I’m pretty sure. Some have those free scripts from that one guy, you know, that free set. And we’ve got a couple of different versions of home grown scripts. I’m pretty sure most of that stuff works okay, but not all of it has alerts.

Newb: Not to criticize, but have you ever thought about changing all of that to one plan?

Curr: Yeah, but we don’t really have the time. We’ve got a lot of fires that spring up around here. Keeping up with disk space requests alone must take up several hours every month.

Newb: Gotcha. Well I know you wanted me to do some general index evaluations on the important prod boxes. When will my credentials be ironed out so I can get started?

Curr: Yeah, Bill’s got that on his plate. It usually takes him a few days to get a new hire’s SQL permissions worked out. Like I said, we have several dozen boxes.

Newb: ….

A DBA’s first day on the job, with Minion Enterprise

Newbie DBA: Okay, I’m ready to start. Tell me all about your environment!

Current DBA: Here, I’ve got the list of servers in the dbo.Servers table on the repository instance. Look, we have 4 test boxes, 14 QA, and 47 production. Each one of those is ranked for Gold, Silver, or Bronze level support. I’ll give you that support doc in a minute, but you get it: the gold ones are super important.

Newb: Looks like most of those servers are on SQL Server 2019.

Curr: Yeah, this software checks in on all the instances, so we always know what instances have been patched and which haven’t yet.

Newb: Awesome. What do you guys use for backups around here?

Curr: It’s a mix, but we’re moving to Minion Backup. It’s free, and ties in with this piece, Minion Enterprise. But even for the instances that haven’t moved over yet, we still get alerts from ME if a database hasn’t been backed up recently.

Newb: Okay, that’s pretty cool.

Curr: Oh yeah, you haven’t even seen the start of it. Minion Enterprise does so much that saves us heartache. Like, security audits are easy, we get reports and alerts on disk space, the thing scripts out database objects and jobs. Last month one of the managers decided to drop all of the synonyms on Server4; we didn’t even have to restore a backup. We just pulled all the synonym code from the DBObjectScripts table and ran it.

Newb: I really could have used that at the last job. Junior DBA altered a bunch of views. Okay, so I know you wanted me to do some general index evaluations on the important prod boxes. When will my credentials be ironed out so I can get started?

Curr: Oh it’s done. That’s another thing you can do with ME; I just cloned all of my permissions to your new account, across all the servers. You’re good to go.  Oh, and you should really start your index evaluations inside the ME repository; it gathers a ton of information about objects, usage, and indexes for ALL the boxes. There are stored procedures for index research, like the “clustered GUIDs” SP. You’ll see them when you get in there.

Newb: …wow.

This could be you.

Download Minion Enterprise and enjoy free for 30 days. Your current team and newbies will thank you.