Day 7

So, its been a week of work days at this new gig so far. In that time I have experienced 7 daily stand up meetings (read scrum) in which the members of the Server teams have said what they did yesterday and what they are planning on today, and any issues they have. Its a great group of folks and they are genuinely interested in helping each other out and accomplishing alls goals.

Ive experienced 2 group meetings on Mondays that share with us what the Executive Leadership Council discussed in their Monday meetings as well. The details and quantity of transparent information from top down is refreshing and engaging. The company is doing well, and they want all to know it. I've also had a company Christmas party, a launch party, a lunch out with the team, and even a meeting that blew thru the lunch hour, leaving us all hungry, but satisfied that we had discussed the important issues of the meeting.

The first few days were incredibly overwhelming with information, as the next few weeks are sure to be as well. A lot of new faces to learn, new systems, new product, new processes and policies. There are no cubes here, but each of us has a desk (a few varieties to choose from) that is mobile. The area in which we work and live is a large open space with our desks spread out into different areas and orientations to best suit our needs and the group we participate in needs.

Its an odd configuration, and requires some adjustment, but, its ok. Like everything else so far at this place, its all ok. Kinda even keeled, and nice. The people, the product, the stress, the mood... its relaxing, yet not to the detriment of work.

As far as the databases go, I was able to get access to them on day 2, and started looking into things. I have quite the list that I would like to accomplish on these systems, starting initially with a review, documentation of said review, and backups. Backups seem to be the first thing to delve into, and I immediately noticed that there was a failing job associated with backups. It turns out that the backup file repository can only hold 1 day of a certain databases backups, while 3 days for all others. Thus, the big db fails for 2 days, and the others succeed each day. On the third day, the big one succeeds, as its previous backup is removed. Simple issue. Instead of doing fulls daily on the big one, lets do Diffs. Or we could get more storage. Or... or... well, you get the idea, there are options, and I simply need to design a solution to fix the problem, test the solution, and implement it, then monitor it for success.

I created an email group to be used by all SQL Server jobs to send notifications of failure. I am investigating a couple monitoring tools, including #RedGate Sql Monitor and SQL Sentry's PA. There is development needs, perf tuning of slow running reports, security review, data file size monitoring and baselining, determining the release process, upgrading to SQL 2008 (r2), ensuring CPU speeds are properly being used, monitoring and reporting, and on and on...

It looks to be a great time ahead of me, with plenty to do. Today, I've started to investigate Change Data Tracking for a possible solution to a need. Color me excited and tag me as a happy DBA.