Database Administrator – Steve Novoselac's Blog

SQL DBA: Starting Fresh, What do you do?

If you start at a new place, as a SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA), what is one of the first things you should do? In my opinion, after figuring out the key servers and instances running you need to support… is setting up alerts.

By setting up alerts you can start to get an idea of what is not working and start focusing on things that are failing, etc first. All the while you can still check on backups and getting everything else set up and working, but if you don’t have alerts, well, you are blind.

Alerts should tell you..

1) When a physical server is down (network)
2) When backups fail
3) When jobs fail
4) When logins fail
5) I/O issues
6) the “critical” 14, 15, 16, 17
7) crazy cpu and memory issues
8) services going up and down
9) if your SAN is up/down
10) Hard drive getting close to 100%

and that is just the beginning. What other alerts should DBA’s set up *right away* to make sure they are on top of things?

DBA position at Trek Bicycle Corporation (Waterloo, WI)

I usually don’t mix in a ton of work blog posts here, but I will make a few exceptions.

Some of you probably don’t know, but recently I became the Business Intelligence Manager at Trek Bicycle Corporation, and I need to add a person to the team. The position would be working out of the HQ in Waterloo, WI

We are looking for a Database Administrator (DBA) that is focused on the Microsoft Database and BI stack. Someone who has worked with large volumes of data and moving and optimizing large databases, and of course implementing DB best practices (Security, performance, etc). If you would like more info on the requirements, check out the job posting below or you can contact me for more info.

Feel free to email your resume (make sure to say that you found this through my blog!) to my work email steve_novoselac@trekbikes.com

You can also check out the job posting on our website here:

http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/company/careers/post/92/database+administrator