A Day in the Life of a DBA

A DBA, or database administrator is a vital component of any IT company. Essentially DBAs are the ones responsible for all the important housekeeping items in relation to databases. DBAs are the ones who back up and perform routine maintenance on databases to ensure that things run smoothly and your data is healthy and safe.

That being said, this is a general outline of what a DBA may do. As such, we’ve put together a list of what a day in the life of a DBA may look like in order to give a more in-depth look. Granted not every DBA may do all of these tasks daily, but it’s a good place to start to get an idea of this extremely hectic profession!

A DBA’s Day

Pre-business-hours:

1. Respond to pages from the database servers if on-call
2. Data files filling up
3. Archive log files filling up
4. OEM agent 100% CPU
5. Background process excessive elapsed time

First thing at the office, check email for:

1. Failed backups
2. Failed jobs
3. “Emergency” requests (usually emergency changes apply in the database)
4. No-notice early meetings

Mid-morning:

1. Performance war room for a DevOps team (i.e. if an application is slow, a DBA presence to may be needed)
2. New urgent requests (contractors need db access and they’re billing hours for nothing until they get the access)
3. Change control meeting

Noon hour (never time for lunch!)

1. Meetings with project managers
2. More urgent requests (need a new development DB spun up for the new contractors)

Early afternoon:

1. Finally a lull in the emergency requests enables a look at routing request tickets (lower priority user creates, lower priority db changes, general communication)
2. Pull in some data for building reports for management

Mid-late afternoon:

1. More emergency requests (application slow again; software bugs that initially get blamed on the database; more performance war rooms)
2. “OH BY THE WAY” – 11th hour reports due “before you go  home”, – last-minute asks

After business hours:

1. Scheduled database changes (patching, restarts for parameter changes, Dev and QA refreshes)
2. Respond to more pages if on-call

Sleep:  Never

MAS for DBAs

All of these tasks can be quite time consuming and can pull your DBA away from other areas where they can be of assistance, like helping out on projects. That being the case, Vendita can help.

MAS was designed by DBAs for DBAs to help automate their maintenance task. It can perform automation across multiple databases simultaneously! A Gardner Group study found that when MAS was implemented into an organization’s environments, total productivity increased by 40 percent!