This page will be a dynamic page. Right now it serves as a hub of some of the things we discussed in the PASS Presentation and the live Q&A afterward.
The sections below are self-explanatory and you might want to bookmark the page as I’m sure more will be added here as we go.
Coming Soon
In the coming weeks, I’ll write a blog post about and share some details here about a mastermind group of sorts I’m working on creating for January. The format will be a smaller group to start, with regular content, a discussion forum to talk through questions, a monthly (to start, frequency can go up if it makes sense) office hours where we can chat about any SQL topic, and some regular learning and reviewing of your servers together.
The goal will be mentoring/encouragement/learning and some advice as you tackle the databases in your world. Look for more on that soon! Subscribe to the blog for updates, or just shoot me an e-mail: mike@straightpathsql.com for more info.
The “Ten Things”
The main theme of the presentation is the “ten things” you should focus on as a new DBA. I’ll be adding here information for the ten things. I’m working on some blog posts (that are a little past due!) in a series that also cover these ten things and I’ll be adding links here just as soon as I finish those posts.
Inventory and Assessment
We have to know what we have first! I posted a bit about some ideas and tips here in this post about inventorying and assessing your SQL Server world and shared some links to some of the tools we discussed in the Q&A as well. Check out that post for some of the tools and links we discussed.
Recovery
If we can’t get our data back, we’ve failed at job one for DBAs. In this post, I talk about the importance of SQL Server backup and recovery. Again linking to some favorite tools and ideas. Pretty exhaustive dive into recovery models, backup types, and some links.
Checking Database Integrity
Being able to restore is pretty important. But you also need to make sure what you have is safe from corruption. The only way you can be sure of that is to check for it! This is an older post where I talk about a “Corruption Resistant” backup strategy. The next post in the DBA tips series will be one on corruption proofing, though.
Patching
Especially nowadays, patching matters. And having the right schedule and approach matters. In this post from 2020, I talk about patching SQL Servers. Some good tips there, and we’ll have another post out soon in the series with the “ten things”.
Security
Once we know we can recover, we are safe from corruption, we know what we have, we’ve looked at the maintenance tools in week one, and we’re patched – let’s make sure that as we start rolling out best practices, no one comes through and undoes them on us! We’ll have a post in our series covering the ten things soon on this – but for now, check out this Microsoft Doc that is a good place to start with security.
Best Practices & Maintenance
In the post above for the first of the ten things link, I talk about some of our favorite tools. I actually have a series of tips about some of these settings and best practices in our Straight Up SQL Server Tips from a few years ago. I’d say looking at those tips, looking at the Ola Hallengren maintenance scripts, and running SP_Blitz is a good start here. One of the deliverables in that series of blog posts about the “ten things” (two weeks to a Healthy SQL Server series), I’ll be sharing a proposed maintenance solution checklist/PDF that we use at Straight Path with our clients. You can also download our SQL Server health check document to use to do a self-check on best practices.
Alerting and Monitoring
SQL Server Tuning
Future Proofing/Planning Ahead.
Documentation