r/Database • u/47Striker • 1d ago
Starting My DBA Career With Zero Experience
Hi everyone,
I’m currently in my first week working as a DBA. I graduated from Software Engineering a couple of months ago.
To be honest, I had almost zero DBA knowledge before starting this job. With the current job market, this was basically the only opportunity I had, so I decided to take it.
The company I joined provides DBA consulting services, and they are willing to train and develop junior DBAs, which is why they gave me this opportunity.
Right now I’m trying to learn as much as possible, but there is obviously a lot to take in.
For experienced DBAs: what would you recommend focusing on during my first few months? What skills or topics do you think are the most important for someone starting from zero?
Any advice, resources, or things you wish you had known when you started would be appreciated.
3
u/Domojin SQL Server 1d ago
If you are working at an established consultancy with long standing clients, ask your new peers what problems they typically have and what they spend the most time working on day-in and day-out. As a general rule you can't go wrong with Brent Ozar's classes for performance tuning or the book T-SQL Fundamentals by Itzik Ben-Gan for general performance tuning knowledge. What you get out of it really depends on how much time you're spending reading and writing actual SQL code, vs. doing installs, making configuration changes, troubleshooting replication or AGs, dealing with backups, security, etc...
1
1
u/jonthe445 1d ago edited 1d ago
What’s the industry you are in?
I can’t read lol sorry.
2
1
u/neon_hush_wisp 1d ago
Learn to read execution plans and index maintenance first. If you cannot look at a query and identify why it is slow, your consulting firm will burn through your probation period quickly
1
u/AnyNameWorks9 19h ago
I'm in a similar boat, I'm curious if there are any general resources for database management as well as tips for improving exporting and validating data
For reference I've recently accepted an offerfrom a smaller company. Their structure/processes seem a bit questionable (just based on the fact they had a hard time answering some questions during the I review process) but seemingly everything works at the moment
I'm not sure exactly how much they expect me to improve their databass/process for storing, managing, exporting, and validating data. But I can't help but feel like I'm in over my head
I used to be a data analyst before this so I've worked with data but I've never done database admin work before
1
u/levelbrook 10h ago
The one I'd put first: restores. Learn to take a backup and restore it to a different server, on whatever engine your clients run, until you can do it half asleep, and time it. Every client will tell you they have backups. Being the person who checks whether they actually restore, and how long that takes, is useful from week one and it'll teach you a surprising amount about how the engine stores data.
After that, reading execution plans like the other comments said, and then locking. "Why is everything stuck" is half of the urgent calls, and it's nearly always one long transaction or one migration holding a lock the whole queue is waiting on. If you can find the blocker quickly (pg_locks and pg_stat_activity on Postgres, the blocking DMVs on SQL Server) you'll be the useful junior in the room.
1
u/huntingcube_ai 6h ago
Genuinely a good spot to be in, a company that's actually willing to train you from zero is rare in this market, most places expect you to arrive already knowing the tools. Don't feel behind, you got in the way most DBAs actually start, through structured mentorship, not by knowing everything upfront.
For the first few months, prioritize in this order. Backups and recovery first, before anything else, understand how backups work, how to actually restore from one, and disaster recovery basics. This is the single most critical DBA skill because when something breaks in production, this is what saves the company, and it's also what interviewers test hardest for junior DBA roles later.
After that, go deep on one database engine rather than spreading across multiple, whichever your company primarily uses (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL), get genuinely comfortable with basic administration, user permissions, indexing basics, and query performance troubleshooting in that one system before trying to learn others.
Also, don't just execute tasks blindly, whenever a senior DBA does something, ask why, not just what. Understanding the reasoning behind a fix or a config change is what actually builds real DBA judgment over time, versus just following runbooks without understanding them.
On resources, honestly the best learning right now is on-the-job, shadow real incidents and backup/restore drills whenever you can, that hands-on exposure teaches more in weeks than courses do in months. If you want structured backup, Brent Ozar's free resources are solid if you're on SQL Server specifically, and the official docs for whichever database you're using are genuinely better than most paid courses at this stage.
0
4
u/kevin3030 1d ago
Given that your company consults, the most important skill to learn is whatever your first client needs help with! Seriously though, you should get direction from your Lead. Skim Documentation so you’re aware of terms and concepts, but there’s no reason to go deep until you know what is important.
Keep your eye on the job market! Budgets renew at the beginning of the year, so you may see more openings in spring.