Developer’s life is never easy. DBA’s life is even crazier.

DBA’s Life

When a developer wakes up in the morning, most of the time have no idea what different challenges they are going to face that day. Of course, most of the developers know the project and roadmap, which they are working on. However, developers have no clue what coding challenges which they are going face for that day.

DBA’s life is even crazier. When DBA wakes up in the morning – they often thank that they were not disturbed during the night due to server issues. The very next thing they wish is that they do not want to challenge which they can’t solve for that day. The problems DBA face every single day are mostly unpredictable and they just have to solve them as they come during the day.

Though the life of DBA is not always bad. There are always ways and methods how one can overcome various challenges. Let us see three of the challenges and how a DBA can use various tools to overcome them.

Challenge #1 Synchronize Data Across Server

A Very common challenge DBA receive is that they have to synchronize the data across the servers. If you try to manually write that up, it may take forever to accomplish the task. It is nearly impossible to do the same with the help of the T-SQL. However, thankfully there are tools like dbForge Studio which can save a day and synchronize data across servers. Read my detailed blog post about the same over here: SQL SERVER – Synchronize Data Exclusively with T-SQL.

Challenge #2 SQL Report Builder

DBA’s are often asked to build reports on the go. It really annoys DBA’s, but hardly people care about it. No matter how busy a DBA is, they are just called upon to build reports on things on very short notice. I personally like to avoid any task which is given to me accidently and personally building report can be boring. I rather spend time with High Availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning rather than building report. I use SQL third party tool when I have to work with SQL Report. Others have extended reporting capabilities. The latter group of products includes the SQL report builder built-in todbForge Studio for SQL Server. I have blogged about this earlier over here: SQL SERVER – SQL Report Builder in dbForge Studio for SQL Server.

Challenge #3 Work with the OTHER Database

The manager does not understand that MySQL is different from SQL Server and SQL Server is different from Oracle. For them everything is same. In my career hundreds of times I have faced a situation that I am given a database to manage or do some task when their regular DBA is on vacation or leave. When I try to explain I do not understand the underlying the technology, I have been usually told that my manager has trust on me and I can do anything. Honestly, I can’t but I hardly dare to argue. I fall back on the third party tool to manage database when it is not in my comfort zone. For example, I was once given MySQL performance tuning task (at that time I did not know MySQL so well). To simplify search for a problem query let us use MySQL Profiler in dbForge Studio for MySQL. It provides such commands as a Query Profiling Mode and Generate Execution Plan. Here is the blog post discussing about the same: MySQL – Profiler : A Simple and Convenient Tool for Profiling SQL Queries.

Well, that’s it! There were many different such occasions when I have been saved by the tool. May be some other day I will write part 2 of this blog post.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)