April 2007 - Posts

Grade yourself as a good SQL Server DBA

The other day I was evaluating myself as how I'm doing as a dba. I'm not going to write down my scores but in my opinion, to be good your should come near something like this:

Database administration 10    No discussion here, you have to excel in administration
Installation  9 You might as well be good at it as this is a rather small domain to master
DTS  9
SSIS  9
ETL concepts  7
Clustering  8 Not everyone deals with clustering but one day they will
Security 10 Both Windows and SQL Server security and security concepts in general
VB.NET  7 Important in SQL Server 2005
SQL  9
T-SQL  9
SSRS  6 Athough a typical DBA does not develop reports but setting up SSRS in SQL Server 2000 can be quite difficult
SSAS  5
VBScript  9
Hardware  9
XML  7 We won't get rid of it anymore
ERD  9
Disaster Recovery 10
Performance troubleshooting and tuning 10

So what's your score?

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Exploring MOM

I've been asked at work to evaluate several monitoring tools for high risk business critical high availibilty applications based on SQL Server. As we already have a deployed MOM in production along with the management pack for SQL Server, I thought I'd scroll up my sleaves and have a look...

Boy what a product! MOM, where have you been all my live? It takes a few days before you find your way around but is quite straight forward and doesn't need training (I think).

I'm pleased with the product for 2 reasons:

  • I don't have to write any scripts anymore for monitoring a bunch of SQL servers. MOM functions as a single point of monitoring, reporting, alerts and so on.
  • MOM enables you to design your own reports with Reporting Services which makes it a product with endless possibilities.

Some interesting links:

How to create a simple performance graph report for MOM 2005 using a counter.

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 Management Pack Development Guide

 

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DBA, coconuts and daikiris

I kid you not! For years I've been dreaming of holding a position in some french southern territory piece of atol preferebly as a dba. Although I'm quite pleased with my work (in case my boss reads this.. Hi Nico!), one day it will happen I tell you!

Picture this: you get up in the morning around 8:30, 24 degrees celsius, a light breeze. A few small fishing boats along the coast. You're wife nicely tanned wearing a bikini pouring hot coffee for you.

You start working from home around 9 or in case you need to go to work imagine you're driving a nice convertable to the office where you can sit behind your desk wearing only but shorts, no shoes and you're favorite t-shirt.

I was curious what kind of IT jobs I could find on the Bahamas, French Guyana, Guadeloupe and so on but nothing, just really nothing. It looks almost they don't have any computers over there. So, I'll probably stay where I am for the moment. We'll talk again when I'm fourty.

Oh boy...

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SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

I'm using the 2005 book version right now, comes in very handy. Check out the online 2000 version: SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant!

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