I am not sure I understand why some managers do not think that being a DBA is a full time thing and they think that they do not need more than one guy who can manage databases in there spare time. That is just CRAZY!! What is the most important asset to any company these days?  I think that the answer is DATA. Where does the data live? That is correct, it lives in the DATABASE. So why would you not think that managing your most important asset is a full time job? Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per year on database licensing and hardware costs but then they do not think that the investment of a couple full time DBA’s is worth it? Really, i mean what happens if you lose a critical database or you have corruption in a critical database or a database that you have housing sensitive information gets hacked? How much does that cost? Ask Sony about that and I am sure they will tell you how significant that is. How do you prevent this from happening or at least mitigate your losses if something does happen? You have a DBA staff that can help design and implement security strategies, restore strategies, high availability strategies and Disaster Recovery strategies. This really is a full time job and that is not even taking into consideration things like new deployments and break fix issues that happen every day all the time? We have all heard, “My query is running slow today HELP..” Who fixes that? A DBA…

So please listen to me when I say that you need to hire full time DBA’s and make sure you have enough to handle the work that needs to be done. I have been in a few interviews as of late looking for a new DBA and they are hard to come by. So if you find a good one, make sure that you treat them good and do not overwork them. Staff appropriately and just understand what a big and important undertaking being a DBA is. Do not let your lack of understanding what it means to be a DBA be the reason your company can not recover from a data loss situation. Hire good DBA’s and give them the support and training that they need in order to keep your companies number one asset safe and secure and accessible.

END RANT

All that being said I still love Amazon and thank them for all the deals that I did get.

It just baffles me that people with the title of application and database architect do not have a basic understanding of authentication methods in SQL Server. I mean it is not that complex at a high level and we only have two methods for authentication.

All I can say is that if you ask for an account you need to know what type of account you need. The DBA may need to change the server to mixed mode and perhaps that is a major security concern on that instance so the DBA really does need to know this information. Please know what you need before you request it and if you are not sure go talk to the DBA. Most DBA’s are willing to help in order to get it done right the first time.

I did. They were installing an application and called me 7 hours into the install process to tell me that something was occurring on my database instance that was causing this install, that should take no more then an hour, to run so long. Really??? You call me after 7 hours… Get a CLUE!! Call me in an hour and have me check it out…

Anyway, I checked and did not really see any indication of any issue with the instance. They did not believe me and wanted to get a database support person on the line from the vendor to take a look. I obliged and did a remote session with them and what do you know… They agreed with me. The Database was fine but the installer had the issue.

Then the app installer is written so poorly that when you cancel the install it is faster to rebuild the windows server then it is to clean up what the application has done to the server. WOW… So they did that, I deleted the database that it had created and they ran the installer again. Completed in less then 20 minutes. But we wasted 6 hours or more before trying to figure it out and then we just pointed the finger. Thanks guys.

End Rant

I work with one Windows Admin, all he does is Windows, and he out right refuses to learn it. I have attempted to explain as well as show him why it is such a great tool. He will not listen. I am done trying to help him and I have moved on but I had to rant about it just a bit. I do not understand why you would not want to get a better tool to do the job. just recently we had an issue where we needed to change a setting on 11 servers. Now 11 is not that many but I thought what a great reason to break out the good old PS. I mentioned to him that I thought we could script this out in about 5 lines or less of code or he can manually log into each server, navigate to where the setting is, right click on it, and change it, and then log out. Now this is about a 3 to 5 minute process and he will have to do it 11 times. So that is 30 minutes up to an hour of time. Or we can write a 5 to 10 minute PS script that will do it for us. I know what option I want to choose but he chose the latter. makes no sense to me but I do not care anymore. All of the other Windows Admins that are learning and using PS will be more productive and he will eventually fall way behind all of them. His choice and I think he will suffer for it.

That is all I have to say about that.

I get a call from my sister-in-law telling me that my mother-in-law has lost internet connectivity to the main computer but all of the laptops in the house that are using wireless are able to connect. No big deal, I figure it is one of a few things. I have her check the simple things first. Make sure the ethernet cable is plugged in at the router and the computer, have her check to make sure that no one jacked up the connection properties and that the computer is not using a static IP, then I have her release and renew the IP. She snips at me telling me that she is not stupid and that she has checked all the cables and that the tech support person at the cable company already had her release and renew and that it did not work. First of all I never called her stupid, and second if you are so smary why are you calling me?, and third, she never told me that she had worked on this with the cable company. I am a bit upset at this point but it is family and I am always willing to help.

Then I have her take one of the working laptops, disable the wireless connection on it and plug it in to the router. I do this to test that the router is working properly and is not the issue. She plugs the laptop in and tells me that she can not get to the internet still. I have her release and renew on the laptop and she tells me that it is not working. OK I say, based on this I would say that we need to get a new router. Once you do that I will help get it all set up.

They go get the router and she calls back, this time telling me she has gone thru what the book says and set it all up but nothing is working now. She is upset that she is worse off now then before. So again, I start with the basics. Lets check the cables first. The modem is plugged into a cable line and then the modem has a ethernet cable going to the router to the internet port.(On this router it is the only Yellow plug) She insists that she has it right. I try to do some more things and nothing is getting IP’s now and that just does not make sense.  I ask again and this time I pull up a picture of the router online so I can see what she see’s. I again walk her thru it and sure enough she has it wrong.

Anyway, long story short, after about 6 hours of this back and fourth we got everything working, we did however find out that it was not the original router but just the nic in the computer that was bad. I had tried to tell her that it could be that instead of the router but she knew best and then acted like I owed her for getting this all resolved. I told her that if she could do it then to leave me alone so I can go to bed but she just laughed and did not understand how mad I really was. So I am curious how you deal with family and if your family depends on you to do all tech support. If so are they so unappreciative of the help that you provide.

Thanks