DBA Daily Activities – A DBA Checklist
The role of Database Administrator is very critical and important and DBA has to perform lots of activities and monitoring is one of the important task. A good DBA always tries to minimize his routine activities by automating tasks. The activities of a DBA may differs as per experience like junior DBA, senior DBA etc. If you are managing multiple instances and if you have third party monitoring tool then you can monitor the activities easily and keep an eye on alerts. Here I am listing a DBA daily activities and responsibilities.
-> Connect with database instance and check if all databases are online.
-> Check all databases if there is any blocking.
-> Check all scheduled maintenance jobs (eg. backups, statistics, indexes etc.) have run successfully and analyze errors for failed jobs.
-> Check if scheduled application jobs have run successfully and if any job has failed then inform the same to application team.
-> Regularly monitor SQL Server error logs.
-> Check windows server event logs and security logs and try to resolve error if any or report to system administrator or application team.
-> Verify and notedown free disk space available on database server.
-> Periodically monitor blockings, performance, cpu utilization, processor utilization, memory utilization, long running queries etc. and try to find bottlenecks.
-> Continuously monitor SQL server alerts which you have configured and act quickly to resolve issues.
-> If you find any long running query then check with database engine tuning advisor if it suggests any performance improvement.
-> Time to time monitor your team members activities and database servers with SQL Server Profiler.
-> Note down all the changes, settings, users permissions, logins etc. whatever changes you make on database server and keep it documented.
-> Verify database Standard Reports to understand health of database and components.
-> Communicate with your application/development team members and confirm if they have any database or performance related issues, it also helps in team building.
-> Try to learn something new every day for future growth and technical expertise.
Reference: Manzoor Siddiqui [www.SQLServerLog.com]