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Where Do Your DBAs Spend Their Time?

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In a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon was excited to spend the evening reinstalling the OS and apps on his laptop. My wife asked me if I would find that fun. I had to admit that it wouldn’t suck but there were a number of other things that I’d rather do. Last week I reviewed a soon to be published report on the cost of administering various database platforms, including SQL Server. While there is lots of interesting data in the report what I found most interesting was the breakdown of where DBAs spend their time. Since the report hasn’t been published I can’t give out any specific findings but I will share this: according to the report the activity DBAs spend most of their time on is deploying new database servers; accounting for about 40% of their time. I almost fell out of my chair when I read that statistic. Let me say that again: about 40% of a DBAs time is spent deploying new database servers. Really? See the end of this posting for the activities included in deployment.

It’s imperative that managers of DBAs perform a regular audit of where their team spends their time. Then use this data to drive decisions on where to standardized and/or automate tasks with the overarching goal of reducing the time spent on the particular task. In general DBAs make a good salary and the job requires a specialized skill set. Ensuring your DBAs are spending their time on the most important tasks is not only good for your business it’ll be good for the morale of your DBA team. In my experience DBAs don’t mind working hard, they just want to be working on important and interesting projects; I don’t know deploying database servers qualifies.

Activities included in deploying new database servers:

  • Installation: initial installation of the DB software
  • Configuration: creation of DB schema and DB instance settings
  • Security: definition of security settings for the DB instance and access control
  • Integration: integration of the DB instance with the infrastructure, including backup

* If you find that your team is spending significant time deploying database servers you should take a hard look at the sysprep feature new in SQL Server 2008 R2. It just might be the silver bullet you’re looking for.