A good presentation of a DBA's duties has been made available by Jeff Garbus (jeffg@soaringeagleltd.com) of Soaring Eagle Consulting Ltd (http://www.soaringeagleltd.com) and numerous books can be found here. These are Powerpoint slides converted to web pages and so may be difficult to view with a text browser!
An alternative view is catalogued below. (OK, so this list is crying out for a bit of a revamp since checkstorage came along Ed!)
DBA Tasks
| Task |
Reason |
Period |
| dbcc checkdb, checkcatalog, checkalloc |
I consider these the minimal dbcc's to ensure the integrity of your database |
If your ASE permits, daily before your database dumps. If this is not possible
due to the size of your databases, then try the different options so that the end of, say,
a week, you've run them all. |
| Disaster recovery scripts - scripts to rebuild your ASE in case of hardware
failure |
Always be prepared for the worst. Make sure to test them. |
|
| scripts to logically dump your master database, that is bcp the critical system
tables: sysdatabases, sysdevices, syslogins, sysservers, sysusers, syssegments,
sysremotelogins |
You can selectively rebuild your database in case of hardware failure |
Daily |
| %ls -la <disk_devices> |
A system upgrade is known to change the permissions. |
After any change as well as daily |
| dump the user databases |
CYA* |
Daily |
| dump the transaction logs |
CYA |
Daily |
| dump the master database |
CYA |
After any change as well as daily |
| System 11 and beyond - save the $DSQUERY.cfg to tape |
This is the configuration that you've dialed in, why redo the work? |
After any change as well as daily |
| update statistics on frequently changed tables and sp_recompile |
To ensure the performance of your ASE |
Depending on how often your major tables change. Some tables are pretty much static
(e.g. lookup tables) so they don't need an update statistics, other tables suffer severe
trauma (e.g. massive updates/deletes/inserts) so an update stats needs to be run either
nightly/weekly/monthly. This should be done using cronjobs. |
| create a dummy ASE and do bad things to it: delete devices, destroy
permissions... |
See disaster recovery! |
When time permits |
| Talk to the application developers. |
It's better to work with them than against them. |
As time permits. |
| Learn new tools |
So you can sleep! |
As time permits. |
| Read comp.databases.sybase |
Passes the time. |
Priority One! |
