Question

I am a developer. An architect on good days. Somehow I find myself also being the DBA for my small company. My background is fair in the DB arts but I have never been a full fledged DBA. My question is what do I have to do to ensure a realiable and reasonably functional database environment with as little actual effort as possible?

I am sure that I need to make sure that backups are being performed and that is being done. That is an easy one. What else should I be doing on a consistant basis?

Answer 1

Who else is involved in the database? Are you the only person making schema changes (creating new objects, releasing new stored procedures, permissioning new users)?

• Make sure that the number of users doing anything that could impact performance is reduced to as close to zero as possible, ideally including you.
• Make sure that you’re testing your backups – ideally run a DEV box that is recreating the production environment periodically, 1. a DEV box is a good idea, 2. a backup is only useful if you can restore from it.
• Create groups for the various apps that connect to your database, so when a new user comes along you don’t guess what permissions they need, just add them to the group, meanwhile permission the database objects to only the groups that need them
• Use indices, primary keys, foreign keys, constraints, stats and whatever other tools your database supports. Normalise.
• Optimise the most common code against your box – bad stored procedures/data access code will kill you.