Looking “Up and Out” and “Down and In”
Halfway through my morning walk, I look up and see this amazing view. No filter needed. It was naturally stunning. I just stood there a moment soaking in the majesty of the view. The wisp of the clouds, the vibrancy of the colors, the reflection of the water. It was beautiful. And I almost missed it. I had been looking down, watching my step, and happened to look up at the right time. It was a great reminder of the importance of looking “up and out” as well as “down and in.”
This is true with walking. It’s true in other areas of life, too, including life as a database professional.
Good DBA teams look “up and out” and they look “down and in.” They don’t want to miss something.
But what does that mean?
Looking “down and in”
Looking “down and in” means you have to take care of the SQL Servers in your charge. Sure, SQL Servers are resilient. They are designed to be behind-the-scenes workhorses for applications and services. Microsoft has done a great job building in a high degree of robustness into the product.
But that doesn’t mean that you can or should ignore your SQL Servers. Far from it.
Because SQL Server is good at running even under less than ideal circumstances, some potential issues may go unnoticed until it’s a big problem.
For example, if some pages in a key table, perhaps even a system table, become corrupted, it may not be immediately apparent. The corruption may go undetected for days, weeks, or even months. The longer the corruption lies dormant, the more difficult the recovery process.
That’s just one example.
Proactively monitoring and alerting, automating and confirming maintenance jobs, regularly reviewing the SQL Server and agent logs, checking the Windows event logs, verifying and performing test restores on backups, routinely applying patches to test and then production systems, etc, these are the “down and in” activities that help ensure each SQL Servers is healthy, secure, reliable, and performs well.
These are the basic blocking and tackling of the DBA role. And they are critical.
Looking “up and out”
But looking “down and in” isn’t enough. Good database professionals look beyond the day to day operations of their immediate environment. They are watching for trends in the SQL estate. Is it growing rapidly and maybe even unnecessarily? Could the SQL footprint be reduced by consolidating a few servers, thus reducing the licensing costs? Or maybe, given the growth of specific application databases, we can predict that next year’s budget should include additional storage, more CPUs, or additional memory.
DBAs also continuously look for trends or changes in the business and in the industry. Can their environment support the organization’s Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)? Should we consider using Azure or AWS as part of our Disaster Recovery planning? What does the business need? What does our industry require? Are we there?
Good data professionals assess the role that SQL Server has in the business, crafts a vision for their SQL estate, and develops a plan to close any gaps.
Sounds good, but I don’t have the time
“Up and out” and “down and in.” Both are important.
But when? It’s one thing to know what to do. It’s another to have the time and know-how to actually do it.
That’s what our SEROShield DBA Team as a Service is designed help with. We look “down and in” to keep our clients’ SQL Servers healthy, secure, reliable, and performing well. We also look “up and out,” sharing with our clients trends we see in their environment as well as what we’re seeing in the broader SQL Server space.
Want to learn more? Schedule a call or send us an email. It’s easy and there is no obligation