Recently the SQLskills team presented a series of blog posts aimed at helping Accidental/Junior DBAs ‘keep the SQL Server lights on’. It’s a little taster to let you know what we cover in our 3-day Immersion Event for The Accidental/Junior DBA, which we present several times each year. Enjoy!

What is an Accidental DBA?
An Accidental DBA (also sometimes called an Involuntary DBA) is someone whose primary role or job description is not strictly the administration of SQL Server, but is still expected by the company to maintain one or more of the company’s SQL Server instances properly. Many server, network, or application administrators, and even developers, find themselves in this role at some point in their career. This series of posts is focused on helping Accidental DBAs keep SQL Server running with minimal problems, which will allow them the maximum amount of time for other responsibilities in their role.

SQL Server Setup and Configuration

• (Day 1 of 30): Hardware Selection: CPU and Memory Considerations
• (Day 2 of 30): Hardware Selection: Disk Configurations and RAID -> Performance not Capacity
• (Day 3 of 30): Hardware Selection: Solid State Drives and Usage
• (Day 4 of 30): SQL Server Installation and Configuration Best Practices
• (Day 5 of 30): Virtualization Considerations

SQL Server Backup

• (Day 6 of 30): Backups: Understanding RTO and RPO
• (Day 7 of 30): Backups: Recovery Models and Backup Types
• (Day 8 of 30): Backups: Planning a Recovery Strategy
• (Day 9 of 30): Backups: Essential BACKUP Options
• (Day 10 of 30): Backups: Backup Testing for Validation
• (Day 11 of 30): Backups: Backup Storage and Retention
• (Day 12 of 30): Backups: Virtual Machine Snapshots

Implementing Maintenance and Security

• (Day 13 of 30): Consistency Checking
• (Day 14 of 30): Index Maintenance
• (Day 15 of 30): Statistics Maintenance
• (Day 16 of 30): General Security
• (Day 17 of 30): Configuring Alerts for High Severity Problems

Troubleshooting Performance

• (Day 18 of 30): Baselines
• (Day 19 of 30): Tools for On-Going Monitoring
• (Day 20 of 30): Are your indexing strategies working? (aka Indexing DMVs)
• (Day 21 of 30): Essential PerfMon counters

High Availability

• (Day 22 of 30): Determining a High-Availability Strategy
• (Day 23 of 30): SQL Server HA/DR Features
• (Day 24 of 30): Virtualization High Availability

Troubleshooting

• (Day 25 of 30): Wait Statistics Analysis
• (Day 26 of 30): Monitoring Disk I/O
• (Day 27 of 30): Troubleshooting: Tempdb Contention
• (Day 28 of 30): Troubleshooting: Blocking
• (Day 29 of 30): Troubleshooting: Deadlocks
• (Day 30 of 30): Troubleshooting: Transaction Log Growth