Life as a SQL DBA.

Career as a Database Administrator is a very exciting and a prestigious one. You hold a very big responsibility of maintaining a company's data.A lot of Senior people in your company will be having a strong faith in you and you shall be capable enough of meeting their expectations.After spending almost around 6 years being a DBA and after presenting various articles on the technology to the SQL Server Community, today I decide to write something on How my Day really is.

• I wakeup at around 11 am in the morning.
• I start checking my emails to analyse the various requests which have come in.If the request is of a urgent nature and needs immediate resolution then i try to resolve it asap.
• After having my lunch at around 1200 hrs, I start getting ready for office.
• At around 1245 hrs, I start a 2 hr 30 minutes journey for Office. I stay in South Mumbai and my office is all the way on the Central suburbs.
• At around 1500 hrs once I reach office, I start analysing the following:

1. All the Database Backups Status.
2. Status of LogShipping.
3. Health Check of all my instances.

Once done, then i spend atleast 3 hours of my day in Performance Tuning. I have a lot of Performance Tuning work in my project wherin we tune lot of T-SQL queries involved in my Production Servers.

At around 1900 hrs, along with my colleagues, I leave for a break to have some snacks and take fresh air. Being a pure vegetarian, I always prefer eating veg food.

Once back at around 1930 hrs,I spend around 3 hrs time in preparing new and new solutions for Disaster Recovery. I manage around 12 instances of Production Servers, around 12 instances of staging servers and around 4 instances of development servers. Ensuring that all my systems are up and fine is my main priority. To be very honest, I am the only SQL DBA who looks after the entire infrastructure.

At around 2130 hrs, I do for dinner.

At around 2230 hrs,I start my discussion with the vendors, customers which lasts for around 1-2 hours.

The last portion of the day i.e. from 0100 hrs to 0330 hrs, I spend performing the capacity assessment of the Database Servers.

This is how my day goes if things are on the right track.

But not everytime we can expect everything to be fine. Few instances can be such which could ve very tiresome,hard and few of the occassions are as listed below:

• Its around 0330 hrs,I am in a good sleep and suddenly the phone rings and the users say, Hey Satnam, the Production Database is in a SUSPECT mode and its a P1 and we want you to get it resolved for us asap.Being a responsible technologist, I Start my Laptop, connect to VPN and immediately get connected to my servers and try troubleshooting the issue. 
• A case comes wherein when a user executes a particular view and tempdb database grows to more than 100 GB. I am called in to investigate the matter, since the issue is very critical, we spend around 2 and a half day in office to completely fix it.
• We are required to setup Transactional Replication of a 90 GB database and inspite doing all the Homework things don't go pretty well. After a tremendous hard work for 51 Non Stop hours the procedure gets completed successfully.

These are few such instances which I have faced and have completely devoted my time to get it fixed.

At around 0330 hrs, If everything is fine, then i leave for home. I normally spend around 12 hours at work and if things get worse then it takes around 4-5 days in Office.

Being a Database Administrator has given me a lot of name,fame, oppurtunities to interact with more and more prestigious people. I always love writing and whatever research i do, I normally ensure that the same is presented to the SQL Server Community. I am also very thankful to the excellent mentors like Prakash Sawant,Rajinder Gill,Deven Yadav,Bhupendra Valsangkar and Mukund Khawanekar I got in my career.Each and every technologist would be very proud to have a mentor like your'l which shapes the career of an individual tremendously,my Sincere Thanks to all of you. I am also very thankful to the Sincere Team which I have at L&T Infotech, each and every day, I spend with them teaches me n number of new and amazing stuff.

My only advice to all the technologist is to take the career seriously, never loose any oppurtunity,nothing is tough, If done seriously then each and every critical problem has a solution to it.

At last but not the least, I would like to thank Amit Bansal,Sarabpreet Singh and to all the members of SQLServerGeeks for giving me an oppurtunity to be a part of the SQLServerGeeks family. Sincere thanks to all the members of the community for providing their valuable time in reading this blog post. If you like us then do like us on facebook as well, www.facebook.com/sqlservergeeks