A Wandering Mind

This post is the first in an ongoing series about how to survive as the only DBA in your organization. Since October of last year, I’ve been assigned to a team that is responsible for owning and maintaining the development infrastructure. It’s a great team of seasoned professionals, but not a single other DBA. As a result, I’ve had to think very carefully about how I go about my daily work, so as to give our customers consistently good service, while still allowing those without a lot of SQL Server related knowledge to pick up my work when I’m not available.

We don’t need no stinkin’ team…

Sure, who needs teammates? I mean, we don’t need to take vacations, have sick days, or even take breaks to go workout at the gym or go for a run. We can just work all day, handling everything ourselves. And if we’re on vacation, we can always take our laptops with us, and tether our Crackberry to dial in to the network when things need to get done.

If you’re not laughing out loud, or at least cringing at what the last paragraph describes, I’d like to recommend a website for you to browse.

Hopefully we can all agree that we all need time off now and then. And perhaps the occasional unplanned absence will happen, despite our best attempts to be the Cal Ripken Jr. of our office and keep our no-sick-day streak alive. And when that time comes, would you rather have your customers needs smoothly handled without pause, or would you like them passed around from team to team like the proverbial hot potato? Or even better, given that wonderful “Well, can it wait until so-and-so is back in the office?” question. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I hear that question.

You can be the man, without being the man all the time

We all like to feel important and desired; after all, it’s just a natural human need. Early in my career I craved the spotlight and guarded my knowledge carefully, lest someone else take my spot as “go to guy”. It felt great to always be the one to solve issues and get things done. Well, at least it felt great until I came home three hours late and faced a cold dinner plate, or spent the day after Christmas troubleshooting over a dialup connection, while my wife and relatives opened presents in the other room.

At some point in our careers, I believe strongly we have to choose one of two paths:

1. We can keep being the lone wolf who does things our way all the time, however we please, because we’re the only one who ever knows how to do them.
2. We can compromise our rigid principles, stop being stubborn, and learn that sometimes we have to consider if our teammates could do things how we’d do them.

Allow me to clarify that last option a bit: Just because you’re a whiz with T-SQL and could whip up a one-time script to update ten thousandmillion records for that cute girl / guy in Operations doesn’t mean that you should. Because like any reasonable customer, if it’s done once, they’ll expect it can be done again, whether you’re there or not. And if this person / group is an important consumer of your services, chances are you’ll be getting a phone call from your teammate (or your boss) when you’re at your kid’s Scout camp, asking how to modify your query (because you at least saved that and let the team know where it is, right?).

If your whole team is full of crack T-SQL programmers, good for you, go wild (and you are one lucky SOB); otherwise, don’t do something unless you’ve made sure your backup can do it just as well. Maybe you feel comfortable running a series of scripts to setup replication every time you restore a database, but how about the guy sitting next to you who spent most of his career as a Windows sysadmin? I’m not suggesting that you can’t do complex things that can’t be repeated with a few clicks, but do consider how to make the processes easier for those without your experience. Talk to your teammates and make sure you build a process they’ll be able to support. Maybe they’re not comfortable running scripts in Management Studio, but perhaps a wrapper Posh script that prompts them for the necessary information and takes care of things under the covers would be fine.

Believe me, you’ll still be appreciated when you return from that much-needed vacation, perhaps even more so because you made sure your customer would experience the same great service when you’re not there. And there will always be new challenges to tackle where you can flex your muscles to remind everyone just how good you are. Just remember to bring your teammates along too.

Be Sociable, Share!

•