Qa

This is Part 3 in a three-part series. Please see Part 1 and Part 2 for more.

What does your average day look like?

I’m going to punt to my “A Day in the Life” series here.

When you started, did you know what your position was going to look like 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from then? How accurate has that been so far?

I’ve only been at my current job for about 2 1/2 years, but I can speak to the shorter intervals. I’m going to be intentionally vague in spots here as I don’t want to disclose too much.

This is Part 2 of a series. Please see [Part 1]/2019/09/03/qa-dealing-with-thousands-of-databases/) for the background and more.

What is the most unexpected experience you’ve had in this position?

I have two answers to this question.

1. I write more dynamic SQL in any given week than I had previously in my career - all years combined!

2. Many DBAs deal with issues around parameter sniffing and plans being stuck in cache that don’t work well for a number of their requests as a result. This hasn’t been an issue for me because my plan cache is constantly churning and the majority of queries are ad-hoc. I usually see 75-90 percent of my cached plans being created within the previous few hours, although that number has been changing lately as we’ve been shipping query optimizations the past few months.

This is part one of a three-part series.

I’ve mentioned in various places, including in blog posts on occasion, that my production SQL Server instance hosts several thousand (nearly 9000 as of this writing) databases. People are usually surprised to hear this and it often leads to interesting conversation.

Jon Shaulis (blog | twitter) asked me on Twitter recently:

And I realized that I haven’t ever sat down to address this in detail. I’ve spoken about it on the SQL Data Partners Podcast and written little bits here and there on the blog in the context of “here’s something that tripped me up” but I haven’t really sat down to write specifically about the topic.