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Clueless DBA at new workplace :s
Hi SQL Server world, I've recently started as a new DBA at a company, where one of my main projects will be to migrate the current estate from SQL Server 2008 R2 to 2016. My dba career so far, I have about 5 years experience, but mainly as a faint Junior. I don't do alot of studying at home nor am I very hands on; I usually like doing the work that I am shown. I've been here now for approx. 8 weeks, and the only thing I know to do confident-ally is to perform my daily checks (SQL Redgate monitor, SQL Server Agent Jobs/Alerts, Glenn Berry's diagnostic script and then some company counts for the previous day).... and thats it!! There's another DBA here and he's been doing it for about 2 years, but he is actually the BI developer who migrated into a SENIOR DBA. My issue is this: Before I think to learn and understand how to do a migration project, no one here has shown me anything much on the current system: the database infrastructure, the application setup...and I have been cursing myself because I just don't know how I can learn and understand the current system, because the DBA is too busy doing his own BI work... What should I look at? How can I understand the database setup? How can I feel more confident and patient, because right now I feel frustrated and wanna commit suicide (to an extent)... I try to watch PluralSight videos in my spare time, at home and work, but sometimes... I just can't be bothered. I want to be shown and demonstrated things that I will be doing. So I have a battle of motivation going on, but I think its because I don't know what to do or how to go about and understand what the business is and how it fits into the database environment... I've had a quite a few jobs which have left me with negative experiences, mainly because I am not that fast and the people there were unsupportive and quite negative. I'm hoping not to repeat those issues at this place, but my past experience haunts me, which is what i am trying to take out of my mind and say to myself "this job will work, I want to make it work"... But I'm frustrated, I've got no structure and even the manager seems a bit clueless on what I should be doing because he's not telling or giving me a constructive work structure. Please help (I'll try to take all comments with a hand full of Salt) Thanks
I am hoping it will be a side by side migration. Try to start with running upgrade advisor. Try to collect some data points like usage of resources cpu., memory, io, network. I am sure you can get a lot of scripts to do that. Put in a job which will collect all the application server names in a table which are connecting to the SQL Server. Try to look into the security, jobs, alerts, email profiles, packages, report (.rdl) files. The list can be very exhaustive but this can be a start. Hope this helps. Thanks, Tushar
Another key thing is to ensure that your applications can run on the newer version of Sql Server. If this is a 3rd party application (not developed in-house) you would want to be sure that they have been certified to run on the new version. If you a privy to a test environment, you would want to install the new version and test the applications there if possible.
Hey Man, Don't feel down. If I was you, I would regularly check
http://www.sqlservercentral.com. Also look at this article on the site today
http://www.red-gate.com/blog/database-lifecycle-management/youre-not-delivering-devops-database. I would demand a meeting between your manager, dev team leads, their requirements, any current issues they have and how as a DBA you can help them. Any challenges etc... Ask them of peak times and any delays related to it. Get something like idera sql check or red gate monitor. Check jobs for backups (you know at some point you are going to be asked to restore something somewhere). Copy and attach databases to new instance and/or restore databases to the new instance. Warn stakeholders about change of environment. Talk to the dev team (application side of things if you have these guys) and ask them to put aside some time to check that the application works well with 2016. Think about encryption and audits.etc etc etc... you know what I mean. You got to own this role not the other way around. Let us know if we can help you any further. Regards, Waqar
Actually, you need to feel down. You're not spending any time at all learning the profession that pays you to actually know these things. Get a grip, stop making excuses, and put your shoulder to the wheel. Either that or get out of the profession because you don't actually have the right attitude to be entrusted with the proverbial keys to the city for a company.
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