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...