I wanted to get a follow up post to my recommendations for DBA’s for the first day on the job post. After a very busy week last week here is where I stand on my list and what I should add for the next week.

Get a list of Servers I’ll be managing/owning: I’ve got the list, can’t say I have access to all of them but working through that. Run the SP_Blitz: I’ve got this done on several servers and honestly haven’t done a ton of analysis on it yet. Still high on the list. Get a DBA database created on each server: Done for known servers. Create the server side trace: Done for the primary prod servers. Create perfmon counters: Done for the primary prod servers. Install SSMS tools pack: Done (and it’s already saved me), Check the backups/backup schedule: Taken care of by a managed host provider, many changes in store for this one. Check the security model and who has access to the DB: Figured out most of this and some changes are in plan for the future as well.

Things to Add after your first week.

Developer communication/training. We have a developer training planned this week and I’m prepping a presentation based on performance tuning and some of the procedures I’ve worked on over the last week. It’s a great time to start building relationships with the DEV team and working with them to improve the app and server even more. Slow procedures/query tuning. Now that you’ve had your trace and performance counters in place start researching what you can do to improve the performance of the server. Perhaps hardware is needed or memory settings need to be changed. We saw a big increase because of a server mis-configuration in the memory settings. DMV’s, I want to get these into the first week list but didn’t have a chance and don’t have an automated procedure but am researching some right now and plan to have them running in the next week. Capturing query info and index info in DMV’s are key. Optimizations, unfortunately there is still a lot of mis-informaiton out there about what needs to be re-indexed/rebuilt and checked. I’ve found a very heavy optimization job running on the servers and need to re-factor this to really help the performance of the server. This is top on my list as it’s running into prod time and needs to get fixed. I’ve also found Shrink jobs running (never a good thing). Last major suggestion for this week is be cautious. You’ll find lots of things that you want to change and you may be tempted to start making wide sweeping changes but be careful. If your systems haven’t been looked at by DBA eyes for a while then making large sweeping changes could have a huge impact on the system. Make sure to document and test anything you put into place. One method I use for this is getting a mailbox setup that I can email my changes to and store them that way I have a history. If you have a Team of DBA’s with you this works well to inform all of them at once.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to blog out mid next week with some of the scripts I’ve been talking about. Let’s see how this week 2 goes for me. 🙂