I got a great question from a student recently:
In your opinion, where is the distinction between Junior DBA and Senior DBA? I’ve always worked on small teams, so sometimes it’s hard to tell where I fit.
I learned to do Change Management from some really smart people. When I first became a DBA, I worked at a small software company where changes were released with increasing frequency over the years. Our team was really great at planning and deploying changes, because we constantly worked at improving.
When you need to measure how long a query takes and how many resources it uses, STATISTICS TIME and STATISTICS IO are great tools for interactive testing in SQL Server. I use these settings constantly when tuning indexes and query.
Patching isn’t fun. It’s time consuming, thankless, and easy to break stuff.
But you can’t skip it. For critical systems, you need to subscribe to patch lists for SQL Server and review issues that are fixed regularly.
Hindsight is everything. I was lucky to be trained by a great team of DBAs back when I first started with SQL Server. But it’s hard to know exactly what you really need to know, particularly as new tools are becoming available.
There are a couple of local security policy rights that are not granted by default in SQL Server setup that I’ve been setting manually for a few years now:
Somehow, I didn’t know about slipstreaming installations of SQL Server until last week. I heard about them at SQLPASS in Allan Hirt’s session on installing SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 clusters.
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