SQL Server supports numerous commands, most of which are extremely well documented with detailed examples provided in “Books on Line.” However, there are quite a few that were left out of the official documentation and remain unsupported by Microsoft. You’ll find references regarding these in blogs across the Internet and some are more useful than [...]

The very thought of database corruption makes my skin crawl. Unfortunately, it’s something that all Database Administrators will eventually experience and need to correct. I’m not going to discuss how to recover from this lurking problem. Instead, I’m going to give you some simple strategies to ensure you are aware of the issue as soon [...]

For any SQL Server DBA who has been in the game longer than the advent of SQL Server 2005, there was one standard place to turn when you wanted to tune your database.  You would turn to the profiler!  If you had some experience with this, and had been burned by getting too small of [...]

In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate [...]

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between [...]

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly [...]

As we learned from my last post, it takes much more than technical skills to become successful as a database administrator.  One of the key measurements DBAs can use to evaluate their performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy [...]

Let’s deviate from tuning for a couple of weeks.   I’d like to turn our attention to a topic that I have lightly covered in the past.   It is the premise that it takes more than just being a great technician to keep DBA customers happy.  There are dozens of database “experts” out there that are [...]

Setting up a Successful Test System in Oracle This meeting is held as soon as the application developers are ready to begin the actual coding process. The ultimate goal of this meeting is for application developers to have a firm understanding of what is required to create and maintain a successful Oracle test environment. Discussions [...]

Let’s continue our discussion on the Art of Being a Successful DBA. The intent of this blog is to help administrators design and standardize on a formalized design review process. The goal of the design review process is to identify and address application design, process flow, program logic and SQL statement problems early in the [...]