How Does a Database Administrator Spend a Workday?
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Shift Turnover
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A database administrator starts his day going through his daily responsibilities. A typical day would start by checking the previous shift's turnover. This may be in a form of an email with a specific template to do a hand-off. This template consists of checklists created for specific reporting of events in a hand-off or turnover. Some of the events would be problem tickets reporting application breakdowns affecting a database. Some database administrators would even have an hour in between shifts to do a warm hand-off, to ensure that if there were issues from the previous shift, the next shift would know what to do. A warm hand-off means making a phone call directly to the next person on duty to confirm the email turnover, should there be issues that need further explanation best conducted via to phone instead of email.
Database Health Checks
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Next, a database administrator would do a health check on the databases. Since most of the databases would have a form of alerting system that would send an alert by page or email to the database administrator's email, it is still a best practice to do proactive health checks by using the consoles to check the overall health of the databases and the systems they reside on. There are different types of database monitoring systems that the database administrator should be using to do proactive checks. The database administrator is also responsible for configuring the monitoring systems in order to pick up alerts correctly.
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Troubleshooting Escalated Problems
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Oftentimes, a database administrator will receive in his ticketing queue some problem tickets that need attention. Most of the urgent ones would have higher priority status marked on the tickets. A database administrator would work on each issue based on priority and impact levels. A database administrator should be efficient and proficient in troubleshooting database problems. This may start from reading and identifying the symptoms from database logs. Depending on the severity of the problem, a database administrator may work on the issue on his own or escalate to the next level if the issue is something that is more in depth. Escalating to the next level would mean, in this case, sending issues to a more senior level database engineer to aid in the troubleshooting. At times, problems may stem from other dependencies such as hardware or code problems; therefore, a database administrator should know how to analyze each problem thoroughly to determine the next course of action.
Installation and Deployments
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From time to time, a database administrator may be working on projects. These projects may include new database installations and configuration, such as Oracle, DB2 and SQL server software. He may also be working on database creations, set-up and schema creations. Schema creations consist of creating tables and fields within the database tables. He may need to also install and configure the database clients on application servers. There are times that databases need tuning, so part of his daily tasks may involve database tuning.
Miscellaneous asks
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A database administrator will sometimes work on database user account and access management, database audit and security, capacity planning, backup and recovery, data loading and processing. A database administrator would also perform database upgrade, patching and support. Most of these so-called miscellaneous tasks are necessary; however, they do not take precedence over the problem tickets and health checks.
Turnover Pending Tasks and Issues
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A typical workday for a database administrator ends the same way that it started, doing a turnover. Close to the end of his shift, a database administrator should list the pending deliverables, especially the ones that need immediate attention and completion by the next shift. Some of the urgent ones would concern a continuation of troubleshooting major issues that need resolution and work that cannot wait until the next day. He will only leave when the next shift understands all the pending issues that need immediate attention and after completing the warm hand-off.
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