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The role of the DBA is not just one of protection, it is also one of availability.
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The role of the database administrator can be a varied one. Depending on the size of the team a DBA can be expected to cover a wide range of responsibilities which require an ever increasing range of skills. Some of these skills may be unique to your organisation and others are likely to be used by every other business.
On any usual day a DBA will be checking that backups have completed from the previous night, all maintenance jobs have successfully run such as database integrity checks, index and stats rebuilds and overnight data processing pipelines have processed correctly. There will also be checks to make sure all instances are online and there are no errors in the logs which need to be investigated such as failed login attempts or network timeouts.
Checking Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups are online and available is an important part of the role too. AG's (Availability Groups) replicate a database from one instance to another. AG's can be synchronous or asynchronous but databases can have issues replicating to the other instance. Sometimes they fall too far behind and they need a DBA to step in to get them back in sync.
Monitoring what is happening on each instance such as blocked processes and looking out for any deadlocks deadlocks which could cause applications to stop responding. A DBA will be able to jump in see what is causing the issue and resolve it with minimal consequences. Reporting on production databases is often a route cause and may produce the least fallout.
Security is a big part of a DBA's responsibility. Creating users, server logins and revoking access to databases and their instances is vital to protecting the data under your control. As employees change roles access may need to be revoked from some databases and granted to others. Making sure that the principle of least privilege is maintained is a security control that needs to be followed.
Security Audits are required making sure that any login failures are investigated as well as any new users that could have been added by mistake or by bad actors.
Performance Tuning. There is always something to optimise on a data platform. From code to system configuration, maintaining performance can save money on expensive upgrades to new hardware or save on scaling out current systems.
Test restores of backups should also be completed. If a backup file is not tested it's just a file.
Disaster Recovery planning is another process that needs to be designed and regularly tested to make sure that systems can keep working through a disaster scenario. Updating of any documentation or disaster recovery plans is imperative. They need to be available and accessible in a disaster scenario. No point having a server down if that contains all the documentation to get it back up and running.
Not all disasters are server outages. Sometimes there is data corruption such as a torn page and occasionally there is meta data corruption requiring a restore from a successful backup. To err is human and most issues are actually accidental deletion of data. Once again this can be resolved with the restore from a backup but that could cause other data loss any transactions that have taken place since the accidental deletion.
If there is one thing that you do not want to be doing during a disaster scenario, it is googling what to do. Every minute counts when you are required to meet RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) during a disaster.
One obvious and very common tasks for a DBA to perform is the Installation and configuration of new SQL Server instances. When a database server has reached capacity it is quite common to create a new default instance on a new server. Whilst you can install SQL server quite easily there are several considerations to be made. A DBA knows how to get the best out of SQL Server from the distribution of data across multiple files to the formatting of the block sizes on the disks.
SQL Server has become a complex and fully featured data platform with multiple components extending its capability beyond just the database engine. The other main components are SSIS, SSAS and SSRS but DQS and MDS have been added.
SQL Server is constantly being improved which means new versions are being released every few years. The current version is SQL Server 2022 but SQL Server 2025 is very close to being released which will create a rush to migrate to the latest version of SQL Server.
SSRS which stands for SQL Server Reporting Services allows you to create paginated reports and since 2016, dashboards. Most recently Power BI has started to replace much of what SSRS has done in the past. DBA's may use SSRS to create reports from the basic to the more complicated but it is not always apart of the job description but it is a nice skill to have.
SSIS which stands for SQL Server Integration Services is a component that allows you to extract, transform and load data from a source to a destination all whilst in memory making it very quick. These processes are created as packages which can be scheduled to execute at various times using SQL Agent. SSIS is extensible with additional components like the components you can get from Kingsway Soft which allow you to connect to additional sources and destinations. SSIS skills for a DBA are very useful as data is always needed to be moved from source systems to a destination like a data warehouse.
Started programming in VB 6 at the age of 15. Got into databases for AS and A levels and didn't know that database administration was a job so I went to study Software Engineering at UWE. I just thought database management would be considered 'IT'. I have been a full time DBA since 2010. Love everything data, software development and just tech in general.
