T-SQL Tuesday #012 – Why are DBA skills necessary?

Invitation and summary from Paul Randal.

Invitation to participate in T-SQL Tuesday #12 – Why are DBA skills necessary?

This month I’d like to step back from the deep technical stuff and ask “why are DBA skills necessary?”

I don’t want to color people’s opinions by giving my own yet, but some things to consider are:

  • What problems have you seen in your career that could have been avoided with some DBA skills?
  • At what point does a SQL Server installation need a real DBA to look after it?
  • How could DBA input help prevent design problems in data applications?
  • Should there be cross-over been developer skills and DBA skills? What about architects? Storage admins?
  • How can business continuity be affected by lack of DBA skills?
  • How much can we rely on auto-tuning to ensure performant work loads?
  • Is Microsoft doing enough to foster DBA skills as a point of excellence?
  • What about on other RDBMS platforms? What about no-SQL?

I could go on for hours… I’m really looking forward to seeing where you take this topic and I’m expecting some great posts.

T-SQL Tuesday #011 – Misconceptions in SQL Server

Invitation  from Sankar Reddy.

Why are so many Misconceptions in SQL Server?

SQL Server as a product is maturing with every new version since its inception and getting better and better over the years. But there seems to be lot of misunderstanding of some SQL Server concepts in the community and probably in my opinion its because of one or more items listed below.

1. While some information holds true in previous versions but they don’t hold true in newer versions (after some components were re-written, optimized).
2. Bugs in older versions are fixed in newer versions.
3. Taking the words out of context from someone’s publication/blogs etc…
4. Someone simply misunderstood the concepts.
5. Never realized the depth of the internals or the scope of the subject.
6. Taking marketing fluff as truth.
7. Too much generalization of the facts based on one or two incidents.

The possibilities for writing up a post on this topic invloving SQL Server are enormous even if you are a novice blogger or the industry expert on SQL Server. So get ready with your [misconceptions, myth-busters, de-mystifiers, do you know, back to basics, fact checking] posts on SQL Server and help the community learn more stuff while setting the facts straight.

I want to take a moment and request if you are working on a misconception that was already busted by someone else in the community and your approach is also very similar then please give credit to the person that did the work prior to you in your post.