Microsoft SQL Server DBA (database administration)
Microsoft SQL Server is a modern database engine, a relational database management
system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. In easy words the Microsoft SQL Server is
a comprehensive, data management software. Its primary query language is Transact-SQL,
an implementation of the ANSI/ISO standard Structured Query Language (SQL) used
by both Microsoft and Sybase.
SQL Server DBA are mostly self taught personals who learned
sql server database administration on job. As far as i know no university awards
database administrator degree to fill the gap and increase employer confidence
each vendor have designed some kind of certification like Microsoft awards MCDBA
certification which can be obtained by passing SQL Server related exams. If
you hold MCDBA then you are called certified SQL Server dba. The best way of
starting in DBA world is to start as database developer and slowly move to administration
tasks. One of the funny thing about being a database administrator is that it
is very hard to describe what exactly a database administrator do specially
to higher management of any company.
Database Administrators are important part of any large corporation specially
if the data is larger then 5 GB in production database. Depending on type of
company and industry we can classify database administrators in 3 categories.
Production SQL Server DBA's, QA / UAT DBA and Development DBA, small businesses
usually have one man show.
What does SQL Server DBA do:
SQL Server Production DBA
- Administering SQL Server Production Database.
- Backup and Restore.
- Monitoring SQL Server Jobs.
- Installing, Configuring database servers.
- Troubleshooting SQL Server production issues.
- Capacity planning and monitoring database growth.
- Replication management.
- Managing SQL Server security and logins.
- Importing Exporting data using DTS, SSIS packages.
- Designing disaster recovery strategies.
- Building rebuilding indexes.
- Dealing with performance issues on production servers.
- Moving objects from QA to Production databases.
SQL Server QA / UAT DBA
- Reviewing SQL Server database objects
- Code review and making sure code comply with current company standards.
- Testing of T-SQL Scripts.
- Testing the patches before deploying on production.
- Working with application developers to know how front end application work and testing results.
- Indexing database and making sure required indexes are present on all objects.
SQL Server Development DBA
- Database Development.
- Writing T-SQL statements.
- SQL Server Stored Procedures.
- Creating Views in SQL Server database.
- New objects creation and database design (important)
- T-SQL code review to make sure its not going to become a performance night
mare.
- Providing suggestions for database development tasks.
- Working with data architects to design database.
- Cleaning data.
- Indexing database tables.
The above list is not a complete job description of database administrators,
In many companies job description consist of much more then the duties listed
on this page.