- Host: Steve Stedman
- Topic: Building a Career
- Recording Date: July 15, 2025
- Listen on Spotify!
Stedman SQL Podcast Season 2 Episode 22 Building a Career
In this episode of the Stedman SQL Podcast, Steve Stedman shares a detailed and practical roadmap to building a successful career as a SQL Server DBA. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to advance your skills, you’ll learn what it takes to grow in this high-demand field. Steve breaks down what the role of a DBA really involves, including performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, and security. He shares the key differences between junior and senior DBAs, and how learning from mistakes can become your greatest asset. You’ll also hear advice on the technical and soft skills every DBA needs, how to get started in the field without prior experience, how to prepare for interviews, and what hiring managers really look for. From lab setups to certifications to community involvement, this episode covers it all. Steve also shares real-world experiences from the trenches, insights from years of interviewing DBAs, and practical action items to move your career forward today. This episode is packed with tips, resources, and proven steps you can use to begin—or refine—your path as a SQL Server professional. Learn more about the tools mentioned, like Database Health Monitor at DatabaseHealth.com, and take advantage of our SQL Server interview prep class at stedman.us/interview25.
Podcast Transcript
Steve Stedman 00:16
Hey everyone, and welcome to this week’s Stedman solutions SQL Podcast. I’m Steve Stedman. I’m your host, and today we’re going to talk about how to build a rewarding career as a SQL Server DBA. And it’s a role that’s definitely critical and needed in today’s data driven world. This is season two, Episode 22 and keep going through the rest of the year and into next year with more podcasts. So let’s jump into it.
Fun fact about SQL Server DBAs. Did you know that most DBAs did not go to school with plans of becoming a DBA I’m sure there’s a few out there, but most people went to school for something related to programming or it or something like that, and ended up in the DBA role. And that’s why the term accidental DBA applies for that. So that being said, it means it’s something that with the right focus attention and learning that a lot of people can do, or most people could do. So our goal of this episode is to take a look at what it takes to build a career as a SQL Server DBA.
So a little bit of background as we jump into this. Like I mentioned, I did not go to school to become a DBA, but when I was working at Microsoft about 35 years ago, I was at a point where they sent me off to, what do they call it, Microsoft University, which was an internal training thing where they were introducing a brand new product called Microsoft SQL Server. And at that point, I got a week long class on how to use Microsoft SQL Server. At that point, there was no Management Studio. It installed on about 30 different floppy disks to get it all running on your system. And I think at that point it only ran on OS two. It didn’t even there was no windows server at that point, but that, that was my official training, and since then, I’ve done a lot of teaching, and I’ve done a lot of work with SQL Server over the last 35 years, but the one thing that I keep coming back to is continuously improving and continuously learning. As soon as someone stops learning, that’s where your career starts going downhill, I think. So let’s jump into it.
So first off, what is a SQL Server DBA, or database administrator? Well, the SQL Server DBA is the person who takes care of the SQL servers. I think a lot of it about, like just a General IT person is kind of the generalist position, and you got a lot of IT people who try to do SQL Server DBA work, but then you’ve got the true DBA that specializes and focuses on everything related to and around Microsoft SQL Server. Now this comes down to a lot of things where it’s really focused on performance tuning and optimizing slow queries and figuring out when something’s going on with that SQL Server and it appears slow. Well, why is it slow? And what can you do to fix that or adjust that? Also comes down to backup and recovery and setting up a robust backup and recovery plan.
And with that, if I had to classify a DBA as the one most important thing that you ever have to do that’s being able to recover a database in an emergency. And a lot of people have great they think they have great backup plans, but until you’ve tested it and proved it and know that you can do it, you don’t necessarily have a good recovery plan, so practicing backups and being able to recover, being able to do point in time recoveries, being able to make sure that whatever scenario happens, that you’ve got a good recovery plan security, making sure that your SQL Server is secured, first with the right user permissions, but then also with the right patch levels and other security settings to keep bad guys out. I always say, in today’s world with ransomware and other things like that, security takes on a whole different meaning than what security was 25 years ago. 25 years ago, we didn’t have so much ransomware and things like that, and security was really just making sure the right people had access to the right things. Now it’s making sure everything’s patched and that any possible vulnerability or exposure is secured so that people can’t get in.
Another key responsibility around being a DBA is around high availability, for instance, configuring always on availability groups or other close to high avail. Ability options like log shipping and replication and stuff like that. Being able to be the one who takes on the primary task, it’s one thing to jump in when somebody’s already set up an availability group and just click around and keep it running, but being able to build it from scratch is a whole other thing. So being able to do those kind of things. Now, the big difference I see when we look at junior DBA or a senior DBA is a lot of it is around. Well, what are they doing? One of them, Junior DBA is more task focused. You’ve been assigned a task. Go do X, Y and Z, get it done. Go get the backups working. Go do a restore. Things like that. Senior DBA is more of a strategic role, and that’s kind of more of the I don’t know textbook style definition there, but the way I really like to look at it is the difference is a junior DBA is someone who is still making regular mistakes on the current systems they’re working on where a senior DBA has already made all those mistakes for A former employer or former job or former system, whatever it may be, and they know not to make those mistakes again. And it’s things like using transactions to safeguard update statements when you’re running them in Management Studio, or things like that with a rollback option so that if you miss the WHERE clause or something like that, you’ve got a quick way to roll back and recover on that. I think one of the things that I’ve seen that puts a lot of pressure on more junior DBAs, and that I really differentiate between a junior and a senior DBA is how quickly they can recover in crisis. We do a lot of managed services work, and occasionally one of those clients we work with will have a developer or other team member who runs an UPDATE statement and maybe doesn’t have the right WHERE clause on it, it ends up destroying or changing a bunch of data in a table. Now if you’re one of those clients, don’t think I’m calling you out specifically, because I’ve seen this happen enough times that that’s not one of you that I’m calling out here at all. So with that, the recovery is, how quickly as a DBA? Can you get that database back up and running and get that individual column or individual table restored in that situation? So that’s kind of the overview there.
Kind of the high level, of what it takes to be a DBA is taking care of the database, things related to performance tuning, backup and recovery, security, high availability and other areas like that. Now that’s not it. It goes on to a lot more detail. Now, the thing is, there’s a lot of essential skills that you really need to be able to master in order to be able to be a DBA. And one of them is probably the most fundamental and basic is TSQL for writing queries and optimizing queries. If you don’t know TSQL, it’s going to be really hard to optimize queries or write queries. So, but when I talk about TSQL, I don’t mean that you know it just well enough to be able to write queries. What I mean as a DBA, you need to know TSQL well enough to help others and to help others write queries and to help them improve the performance, and to look at a query and be able to say, this is what looks slow, and this is how we can find out if it’s slow or not optimal, and how do we fix it? I think anybody with a SQL programming book can spend a few hours and write some basic TSQL, but being able to know it well enough that you can find out what are those problem areas, what are those bottlenecks? What are those other issues? And you know, we did another podcast on that, on some of the common TSQL pitfalls a couple months ago. So if you want to look at some of those things, you can go back and check that. (https://youtu.be/x7CMlqV0iBU)
But another area that DBA needs to be really strong in is indexing, and being able to use indexes and other strategies to boost performance. And that’s one of those things that comes with experience and practice and working with queries. Write a query, figure out why it’s slow, figure out what you can do to make it run faster, work on a system, find out what the most CPU intensive query is on a specific database, and go and figure out options for how you can make it faster. Those are important things to be able to do as a DBA, because they come up day to day in the work that’s needed.
The other thing is looking at backup and recovery processes to ensure data integrity. And then earlier, I talked about how important being able to recover is, but it’s not just running full backups, but it’s also being able to properly manage full differential and log backups so that you’re able to hit the right recovery time and recovery point objectives. If you want more information on that, there’s a podcast we did a while back on backups and recovery and RTO and RPO. (https://youtu.be/qtx1EaNNbWU) So that’s a good one to consider. And with that, understanding what the recovery objectives are for recovery time and recovery point, and making sure that the system you have in place actually meets those and then practice them being able to restore. Quickly when it’s needed, and understanding options for the specific environment around what you have available for backups. Your backups are going to be very different if you’re on prem in a hosted virtual machine, versus at RDS or Azure or other situations like that. One, you might simply be right into a network share other you might be going to Azure Blob storage, or RDS, s3 bucket or something like that. But understanding what the right backup strategy is, is important for each one of those different servers. And then with that, there’s also a backup and recovery course that I have that really focuses on how to do recovery really well as a DBA, and that’s available at Stedman.us/backup and it’s probably one of the most important classes that I would say for any DBA is to be able to do backup and recovery well.
Other technical skills as a DBA that you really need are to be able to be familiar with tools like, obviously the SQL Server Management Studio is one where every, most, everything you’re doing, is going through that, but also other things like SQL Server Reporting Services or SQL Server Integration Services. Now you don’t have to master those, but you want to be able to at least do what’s needed to administer them, although maybe you’re not a report developer, but you need to be able to figure out how to install or upgrade reporting services when you move to a new server. Now, the other thing it comes down to as well for a DBA is not just the technical skills, but what often refers gets referred to as the soft skills. And this is the maybe the non technical problem solving under pressure. Now that’s one of those things as a DBA. There are a lot of times that you’re put under a massive pressure to go and do something that’s a game over scenario for your company. Whatever it may be that’s broken needs to be fixed because there’s no orders flowing, or because we’re going to lose all the customer data, or whatever it may be, the trick there is to stay calm, cool and collected and not turn into Chicken Little with the sky is falling.
Now think about this, what experiences you can bring to this. For some DBAs, I’ve seen them their first crisis situation, they end up at the end in tears and end up quitting and not wanting to be a DBA anymore, because this is the most stressful and the most crazy thing they’ve ever had to deal with. Well, think about that. What other things in your life can you apply that maybe help you cope with some of the stress or issues around working as a DBA? For me, I’m a volunteer firefighter and EMT we deal with some pretty stressful and crazy things Fire Department related. And the thing I take away from that is even the biggest database issue that we will ever come across will have a much better outcome than many CPR calls or fires that I’ve been to. Nobody’s generally losing their life on a database issue. Well, it depends what part of the world you live in, but hopefully that’s not the case. So my experience is I’m able to really stay calm and deal with database issues because of I’ve dealt with other things that are way more stressful and way more critical, maybe not critical is not the right word, but way more stressful and difficult than dealing with database issues.
No matter how bad the database issue is, there are probably options that you can solve now, the other soft skill that’s really big is communication and DBAs are generally and this is more of a stereotype historically been not the most, not the best communicators, and a lot of them are like, just put me in my cave and just let me do my work, and I don’t want to talk to anyone. But that’s not good. That’s not healthy in most environments. Silence is deadly when it comes to this situation and keeping stakeholders in the loop, even if it’s bad news, just to keep them involved of what’s going on and what you’re finding this is one of those things that few years ago, I was working with a company where we the dev team, had all switched to Agile with weekly stand ups. And we brought the, actually, no that was daily stand ups, and we brought the DBA in and the DBA just did not want to play in that weekly stand up environment because it made him talk, it made him get other people exposure to what was being worked on. Now that’s not a healthy environment, so part of it is figuring out, with those soft skills, how you interact and work with the rest of the team to be as productive as possible if you’re working in an agile dev environment. Well, you as a DBA, you’ve got to be part of that agile dev environment. You can’t be a stick in the mud and just say, Nope. I’m not going to do that, because that doesn’t work.
Well, another thing around getting ready essential skills to master is being able to understand different features and different parts of Microsoft SQL Server. Great way to do this is to use the Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition or the Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition. They’re generally both free, but the Developer Edition has all of the features of Enterprise Edition. So it has all the bells and whistles, all the great stuff, but you’re only allowed to use it in a development environment, whereas the Express Edition is free to use wherever, even in production, but it’s limited on some of the features. So what I’ve done, because when I’m working on different things, I need to be able to test and try things on different versions of SQL Server depending on what I’m doing or what I’m working on with different clients. So I set up a virtual machine and on there I have SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 are two. SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2014 SQL 2016 SQL Server 2017 2019, and 2022, and on most of those I have both developer and express edition, zero licensing costs for any of that, but it gives me a great test bed to try things out. So if you know your clients running on 2016 well, you can write code that works well in 2016 if you know your clients working in a case sensitive environment versus a case insensitive database, you can turn one of those test environments to work that way. So being able to have a good test bed, a good place to test things, whether it’s at home or on your laptop or whatever. I see a lot of people, they’ll just have the latest version of SQL server running on their laptop as a DBA, and they’ll think that that’s a good enough environment for all the testing they need to do. Not really. You really need to be able to have those older versions around if you’re working in environments that support those. Maybe not everyone needs 2008 or 2008 or two anymore. But if you’re working in an environment with SQL Server 2016 you better have a 2016 install that you can work with in a test environment so you don’t have to break production. So that’s kind of the technical overview there. So next, how do you get into the field? Let’s say you’re listening to this. You’ve got some SQL skills. You want to become a SQL DBA. Well, where do you get started? How do you get started? Well, most of the time when you’re in this position where you want to get started, you don’t have a resume that’s strong enough to really jump out and compete against others. So how do you build that? Well, part of it is with the environment that you’re working in. If there’s a way that you can help or work with your existing DBAs and learn what they do, that’s a great way to do it. But outside of that, if that’s not available, there’s other things you can do as well. For instance, you can build a portfolio by creating, I don’t know, maybe some sample databases, or contributing to an open source project, or doing something that you’re helping build that helps other DBAs, in some way, get your name out there. That way, you could join a SQL Server community, such as the group that does SQL Saturday, and I know that’s something that’s evolved over the last few years, but SQL Saturday is one of those great free conferences you can go to be able to get learn and get out there and get exposure. You can consider entry level roles like database analyst or IT support that will lead into SQL DBA in order to gain that experience. Another great way is you can volunteer or contribute on an open source project. There’s a lot of different open source things out there that people do in database related. Figure out how you can become part of one of those. Get part of the team. Volunteer a little bit of time here and there, and I bet whatever time you give to something like that, you will take back in value tenfold by what you learned doing it. Consider if you’re starting out and you want to learn more how to intern with a possible employer. I mean, that’s one of those things that I’ve got a couple guys that started out working with me as interns, and then they got done with college, and they came on full time, and now they’re working as Database Health Monitor developers at this point. So a lot of options of how you can jump in and learn that way.
Another interesting one that comes up a lot is certifications. And over the years, Microsoft’s had a whole bunch of different certification series. Gosh, about 15 years ago, I taught the SQL programming and the SQL DBA certification at the local university, and it’s one of those things that if you are an extremely experienced DBA you probably don’t need the certifications as much as someone who doesn’t have the experience, but what certifications will do is they prove that you have enough depth and width into a certain knowledge area to prove that you know more than just quickly pick up and learn there. There. Like the DBA or database programmer, or now there’s lots of Azure ones, Azure data scientists, things like that. You can go take different certifications. What these certifications do is they force you to prove what you know, and if you don’t know it, they hopefully force you to learn those things you don’t know in order to be able to pass that certification, thus expanding your experience. It’s a great way to say, Yes, I can do this, even though I don’t have the resume experience. I can show that I’ve passed these certifications, and I do know what I’m talking about there. And it’s a great thing that I’ve never seen certifications on a resume stand out as a bad thing. They always look like somebody’s tried a little bit more than the next person there. Now the other thing is, the pros around certifications is they will validate your skill, your skills, and boost your resume, but the cons are, there’s a lot of time and cost involved on that and focus on hands on experience and be able to do those things that are needed for those certifications. Another thing you can do in order to boost your skills or get out there, is networking and interacting with other people that you can learn from. Attend a SQL Server users group or SQL Saturday events. Great networking.
One years ago, I was at a SQL Saturday event, and this guy came up to me and said, Hey, I liked your presentation that you did. How would you like to turn that into a book? And it turned out he was a book publisher. And three or four months later, I had my SQL Server, common table expressions book published. And yeah, that was that. Because of that SQL Saturday event, I was able to meet someone who allowed me to do something more to boost my credibility there. Now I get mocked for being so obsessed with common table expressions, but it’s one of those things that it’s a really amazing tool, and being able to be really good at it is something that you can do to stand out amongst others.
So the other networking thing you can do is engage on X, formerly Twitter, by following and interacting with other SQL Server experts and learning from their experiences and sharing your insights, asking questions things like that. One of the interview questions I sometimes ask is, who do you follow on social media that you learn from? And some people say, Oh, I don’t do that on social media. I just have family and friends there. Well, that’s a very different answer than saying you follow these top three people and you’ve learned these 15 things from them. So the other thing you can do to sort of boost your credibility or break into the field is blogging and writing. I mean, I mentioned briefly about how I did a book on common table expressions wasn’t what I’d planned to do that year, but it ended up working out that way. But start a website, start a blog, and talk about SQL Server related content, talk about things you’re learning, things you’ve had issues with, what you’ve done to get around them, and to show that you are knowledgeable in the area that you’re looking for work. Also when you’re doing this, make sure you use your real name or and not some username or handle. So for instance, for me on x.com My username is at SQL, EMT, but my real name is Steve Stedman when I promote things on my blog or other on Twitter or X, I always try and use my real name of Steve Stedman, when possible. That way nobody’s I’m doing work, and it’s always being associated with my name, rather than being confused with, Oh, who is this guy? Who? Who is this? I’ve seen websites that somebody has a technical post on something related to SQL Server. You click through and it’s got some name. Some name, and I mean, not even a person’s name, but some like concept, like SQL whatever. And you think, who wrote this? Who is this person? Do they know what they’re talking about? And basically, they get no credibility out of it, because their name is not associated with it. So put your name out there, and you will learn and gain from that. Also being able to do blogging and teaching and writing and things like that, it helps shows what you can teach rather than what you know.
And I think that there’s two different levels there where being able to just know something and know about it is maybe what I consider level one, being able to teach people about it is more of a level two or a level three thing, where you’ve got to know it so much better if you’re going to share it and teach other people. So when I’m looking at a resume, one of the first things that I look for is, what have they published? What have they done? What is their technical blog? Things like that. Does their blog just have one post that was posted last week, or maybe their blog was had three or four posts 12 years ago, and they haven’t done anything since. What have they been doing over time? If we look at older blog posts and compare them to newer blog posts, and I guess this would refer to social media content as well, can we see that their technical skills are different over the years? I mean, if I mean, I have things that I blogged about 15 years ago that they’re probably a little bit silly or not very accurate in today’s world, but that’s part of the learning process. So start small and make a name for yourself.
When I was at a conference, Gosh, 15 years ago, somebody was talking about things you can do to help make a name for yourself, and some of those things have different points associated with them, but number one, connecting with people on social media such as on x. Well, consider that like a one point on the scale of one to 500 with 500 being the best and one being kind of the weakest, maybe two pointer would be to engage on LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn, in my opinion, seems like it’s really going downhill and dying so that one doesn’t have very many points. I might argue as to whether that’s even worth doing for the future, but it’s it works today. Things like we talked about blogging, if you do a blog post on your own, consider that like five points share content on social media, five points contribute a blog post to someone else’s blog. I mean, I get a bunch of these spammers that send me, oh, I’d like to blog about this, that and other thing. But if somebody sent me saying something about, hey, I’m new, I’d like to put some content out. Here’s an interesting article I wrote. Can I put this on your blog, I might consider that, and that’s something that would be maybe 10 points. Participate in a podcast. You want to be a guest on this podcast. Just reach out to me, and we can look at how to get that scheduled. Maybe we can talk about something interesting that you’ve learned, or what you’re doing to break into the industry, break into the career. I’d love to have you on the podcast to talk about something like that. Submit a product review on some SQL related product, for instance, Database Health Monitor. If you tried out database health monitor and want to get some exposure for your name out there and write wrote a review about it, considering it’s not too bad, I’d be willing to consider putting that on my database health monitor website. Attend SQL Server conferences and networks. Okay, the Submitter Review, that was 15 points. Then attending a conference, that’s 50 points. And this is where we get into kind of bigger things, because at a conference, you’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to network with people next speak at a conference related to SQL Server, past summit that was been going on for many years. I’ve spoken at that, I think, four times now, and that’s one of those things that people will know who you are after doing something like that, and takes a little bit to break into it, but work your way up the list, and you’ll be able to speak at speak at conferences. I remember speaking about database corruption at past Summit, and people in the audience tweeting was twitter then not x, but tweeting pictures of me doing using a hex editor to fix a corrupt database. Well, how’s that stand out compared to me putting on my resume that says I know how to fix corruption? Here’s a photo of it actually happening live in front of a crowd. Lot of value in that.
So 200 points for that publish a book on something related to SQL Server. Now this can be an e book in today’s world, but 300 points for that build some application or a utility relating to SQL Server, build something that other people are going to use. I’d call that 500 points. That would be something like database health monitor that I’ve done, or maybe what Ola Hallengren has done with the Maintenance Solution that he’s put together. That’s a great thing, that his name is known worldwide for that Maintenance Solution. Now I wouldn’t give that one 500 points. I might give that like 5 million points, because that one’s been wildly successful. It all builds over time. Create and host your own podcast with more than a year and grow your followers over time. I mean, that’s one of those things that like I’m doing right now. I’m getting out there. Hopefully what I’m doing here is helping to build my reputation well as provide some interesting content. So that’s the list.
So now let’s move down the list into getting into the job market resume tips, basically, tailor and focus your resume to SQL Server related stuff. If you want to be a DBA and you’re talking about something you did in cold fusion that or something you did in JavaScript on some previous project, you know, probably just a distraction from where you want to be if you want to be a developer, great focus on those other things. But if you want a DBA, be a DBA, focus on what you’ve done SQL Server related, and that those things that are SQL Server related can be actual work experience. They can be the certifications you’ve earned, or they can be projects or lab work or things you’ve volunteered for as well. Interview prep, get ready once you do get that interview, so that you know you’re going to be able to excel at it. Be ready for questions like, how do you troubleshoot a slow, running query? Okay, stop and pause for a moment. Think about that. How would you answer that? Think about what’s your approach to securing a SQL Server instance? Yeah, okay, that will really show how, how in depth. You know, security on the SQL Server. Uncommon one that we see, and I talk about in my joins class is, what’s the difference between an inner join and an outer join in SQL Server? That’s a great question, because it comes up so often. And as a DBA you really need to be able to teach other people that, because so many people make mistakes on joins. If you need help in that area, you can check out my joins class at stedman.us/joins but when you’re answering questions, show that you know in things in depth and avoid short answers. So for instance, if the question was, what is the SQL Server Agent used for? I could just say scheduling tasks done next. But that doesn’t necessarily show that I know that much if my answer instead was SQL Server agents used for task scheduling, it’s also has notifications and alerting when job fails, so that other error or when jobs fail or other errors are encountered, well, that’s a little bit more of an in depth answer there. That’s maybe shows I know a little bit more than just that SQL Server Agent is solely for scheduling tasks. Now, the other thing you might point out is all of the above that I’ve talked about, but point out that SQL Server Agent is not available on the Express Edition, and then if you need to schedule tasks on Express, you can use things like the Windows Task Scheduler, because the agents not there. Or you can go into more depth on different things. I mean, one of them that I like to point out is around SQL Server Agent. It’s kind of a handy little tip is that if you ever want to kick off a background thread? Not something particularly easy to do in SQL Server, to say, run this process on a different thread. Well, one of the things I’ll often do is just put it on a SQL Server Agent job, and then from inside of my program, I can kick off that agent job or that agent task, programmatically, start it when I need it, and I’ve got something spun off running in a different thread at that point. Another thing you can do is to follow up with a question. Once you’ve shared what you know about it, ask a question like, What type of issues or concerns have you had with your SQL Server Agent setup? Keep the conversation going there to learn as much as you can and to show that you’re interested in the environment that the client is interviewing you for at that point, or the company is interviewing you for. Now, another shameless plug here Stedman SQL school interview questions class is a great place to start to prepare for that next interview and to show you areas that you might be lacking or that you want to learn a little bit more. So you can find that it’s stedman.us/interview, 25 and that gives you a 25% discount on that class. Another important thing when you’re going into the process, when you’re looking at the job market, is understanding cloud versus on premises. Talk about different things, like, if someone is purely on prem, talk about what they’re interested in. Do you have plans to go to Azure SQL databases or AWS, something like that? Find out what their needs are and where they want to go, rather than where they’re just just are today, and provide options if that’s the case. Another real important thing is to follow up after the interview with a thank you note and express your interest in the position. I would say maybe one out of 20 candidates that I interview ever does this. But when they do it, it really stands out just it might be just a short email that says, hey, thanks for the interview. I really enjoyed it. From what I can see, I’m interested in working for your company, and then maybe follow up on something. Say, I know you asked about this, and I didn’t really know the best answer, but I went and did some further investigation. And here’s my thoughts on this other topic. So, and I guess this is one of the things that, if you do enough interviewing, uh, eventually you kind of you get used to it, but when you’re first breaking into the market, that might be kind of hard to do.
One of the things that I’ve done at Stedman solutions to help some of our clients is when they’re looking for a full time DBA, which we do work in environments where we help full time DBAs, we’ve helped with that interviewing process, and a lot of it, managers don’t necessarily know how to do the in depth SQL interview to understand. Does this person really know their SQL skills? Do they know what they’re doing with databases? And there’s been a few times that I’ve we’ve done that, and it’s easy to find out what some really what someone really knows by diving into it with questions. So for instance, if the question was something like, tell me about availability groups and you’re you could easily, if you’re on a phone with someone and someone has Google or grok or chat GPT, something like that, they could give you the high level of overview of what an availability group is. Right, perfectly, but if instead, during the interview, they ask Tell me about your experience with availability groups, and maybe some pros or cons that you’ve seen, and include a time that something went wrong. Okay, remember, early on I talked about the difference between a senior DBA and a junior deep the senior DBA is the person who’s already made mistakes elsewhere. The junior DBA hasn’t made those mistakes, and they’re going to make them in your environment. So, and that’s the key thing, share a story that something that went wrong and how you dealt with it and how you fixed it. I mean, if someone’s really used availability groups and they’ve never had anything go wrong with it, well they aren’t very experienced with it, from what I can tell, there’s always some story you could share about how the availability group lost track of the cluster environment, and we had to reinitialize something here or there for that. So there’s a lot of DBAs out there who can ace the interview with the IT manager, but then fail as DBAs because they don’t necessarily know their stuff, or maybe they refuse to work with the team or adapt to the environment like I talked about earlier, where maybe you’re working in an environment with Agile or scrum type developers, and the DBA just doesn’t want to be part of that. That’s a different world. So you need to be able to be flexible on that interview process in order to be able to adapt. Now, once you land that job, that first DBA job, ask a lot of questions in the beginning, but don’t rely on your manager for all of your questions. Don’t rely on your teammates to answer all your questions. The most valuable employees that I’ve worked with are the ones who know how to find answers on their own. Now obviously, if it’s something like, how do I deal with payroll or how do I something related to company specific? Yes, you got to ask your manager, but don’t on day one, start asking technical questions about SQL Server that Google or grok or chatgpt could be giving you instead. The other thing is, when you do ask questions, don’t ask the same question twice. Keep track of the questions you’ve asked and learn from them, so you don’t have to answer the same thing again and again and again. I know when I’m working with a new team member, there’s a lot of questions that I have to answer, but when I have to answer the same question this week and next week and the week after that shows me that I hired someone who doesn’t know how to learn related to that read error messages I don’t know how often I’ve solved a problem that someone has brought to me, they say, Well, I’m getting this error message and it’s related to the security issue. And I read the message and it’s like, no, it’s not related at all to security. It says, right here, it can’t do this because of this reason. Well, there is so much information in error messages, if you just read them and try and understand what it’s saying, You look a lot better if you’re not that one that’s misinterpreting those error messages. The other thing is, everyone’s going to make mistakes and own your mystery. You own your mistakes. Don’t try and bury them. The thing that frustrates me more than anything when working with DBAs is when something gets they screw something up, and they try and blame someone else, or try and make it look like it wasn’t their fault. When something goes wrong, call it out. Hey, I goofed. Here guys, here’s what happened, here’s what I’ve done, here’s how I’m going about fixing it, and here’s what I’ve learned and what I’m going to do to make sure that the mistake never happens again. Okay, when someone tells me, this is what I’ve learned and this is how it’s going to never happen again, that means I don’t have to follow up on this anymore. They’ve done their job. They’ve figured out what the issues are and how to prevent it, and things are all good. Get the team and the client involved so that everyone knows what happened. Because if you try and bury something or hide it, some mistake you’ve made it people are going to find out eventually, and when they find out, you’re going to look really bad if you don’t own it. Now the next thing is own server issues, and take action to prevent them, or learn from them more on the next time it happens. Now that doesn’t mean you have to say, I’m responsible for Windows Server crashing. Well, I mean, probably not, but take the worst case scenario is to say, yeah, the server crashed, and we don’t know why. Okay, well, what are you gonna do to prevent it in the future? Oh, we don’t know why, so we’re not gonna do anything. Well, it’s better to say that, yes, the server was crashed. We had a downtime for this amount of time. We don’t know why it happened, but this is what we’re going to implement in order to get better diagnostic information if it happens again, so we can prevent it in the future. Okay, being able to track and learn from those things.
Also keep in mind that your current job, whatever that first entry level job as a DBA is, is going to be important for your next position. Do well here, learn as much as you can, and you will excel, and that will help boost you into that next position. Use tools to help now there’s some DBAs that I’ve worked with where the only tool they ever use is SQL Server Management Studio, and all they know how to do is copy and paste queries off of Google. That’s not great. That is really not the best way to do things. Use. Tools like database health monitor or other competitors, they can save you many hours every week. I know with database health monitor, there’s things that probably take 200 hours for a busy DBA that we can do in just a few hours using database health monitor that’s available at databasehealth.com and if you want a free trial of that and you’re just trying to learn, let me know I can set that up for you. Also focus on continuous improvement. This is one that I think is real important, and it’s about, there’s this term Lean Manufacturing and lean processes that talks about improving the flow of things, like going through manufacturing processes. But I like to look at that is, how do you be lean and have continuous process improvements around everything you do on a daily basis, find pain points and processes and figure out how to fix them. And there are times that I’ve had a time consuming or arduous process that just drives me nuts, and how often I have to click a dialog and paste the same password 12 times in order to make something happen. For instance, setting up log shipping is one of those. We had a client we’re working with where we had to set up log shipping for about 30 databases from one server to another. We could have done that once and click through all the dialogs, which we did on the very first time. And repeating it 30 times is painful. So what I did is every time I went through it, I tried to cut a few steps off of it. And now, instead of like, two hours to click through dialogs for 30 databases with log shipping, I can do it in about five minutes with a script. And with that script, I’ve saved time, but also saved errors by saving off the script that shows all the database names that need to be log shipped so that we don’t have to look those up or remember them next time or miss something. So figure out how to automate tasks, script them, make things run faster and help others to be lean by finding better ways to do things. I know that’s one of those things that when I’m helping someone who maybe doesn’t know their way around management studio as well as others do sometimes, I’ll point out, here’s what we could do to do that faster. Here’s what might work better. Here’s how you can do that more streamlined the next time, being able to help people, and that’s important being a DBA is being able to help people with the database work. Always keep learning.
Now, this is an area that I worked with, a database developer who was falling behind in his technical skills. It’s probably 15, no, probably 20 years ago. Now he needed to spend a little bit extra time to get up to speed on the latest technology, but he was convinced that his 15 years of experience made it so that he didn’t have to learn anything new. Well, for months, he received updates at weekly status meetings and things that he needed to improve his skills, and he just didn’t have the chops to get the job done. And his only solution was that the company was going to he asked the company to send him to a week long conference in Brazil. Yeah, Brazil, South America, in order to be able to it was the only way he could find out how to learn what he needed to learn. And the company was not willing to pay for a week long vacation, effectively, in Brazil for him. And six months later, he was laid off. Now that wasn’t, he wasn’t laid off because of me, but he was, or I was, I was actually out of the office at the time that happened on vacation that week, but he got laid off because he just wasn’t able to keep up. He was falling behind and everything. So you always have to be improving, and if you’re not improving, you’re falling behind. When I hire a DBA, I expect to spend a lot of time with them in the first few months, and less time in the second month and even less time in the third month. So eventually, all we need to do is chat at a weekly stand up meeting, for instance. So being able to have a deep DBA that can learn and pick up things quickly, I think that’s important. So key takeaway, or some action items here. So this week, go out if you if you’re not a DBA and you want to become a DBA, go out and do something to improve your skills. Go out and write and optimize one SQL query in a practice database, or maybe even in a production database, if you have access to that somewhere, go follow on x.com go follow some SQL Server expert and comment on their post or ask questions or try something out. Another thing to do is go sign up for my interview questions class for 25% off discount. It’s quite a deal at stedman.us/interview 25 but the key here is to never stop learning.
So some of the main points here are, learn. Get a home test environment. You can try things out, home, on your laptop, wherever, engage in the community and always keep improving. Get your name out there. Never stop learning. So every small step, whether it’s a query or a certification, gets you closer to being a SQL Server rock star. So, thanks for joining us this week on the Stedman SQL podcast. Our next episode, we’re going to be introducing some of the database health monitor 3.0 features. What’s changed and What’s new there? This is our big feature release that we’re working on, and will be out soon, and it’s going to be a I mean, we’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of big part of this year, working on database health monitor version three. So some great stuff coming there. So please follow like and subscribe, leave a review or a comment if you like this episode or post a link to this episode on x.com with hashtag of Stedman SQL podcast, and you can always go to Stedman solutions.com for more information on the podcast or other notes and thanks for listening. I’m Steve Stedman. I hope that your SQL Server journey takes you where you want to go. Have a great day.