3 reasons to get help from the DBA

When you’re managing hundreds or thousands of SQL Server Instances with a small group of DBAs it’s not practical to be involved in every aspect of functionality. There will be multiple business owners and developers supporting all range of databases including in-house , third party, hybrid applications.

Production DBAs are normally thinking of DBAs as a service. Including inventory management, patching, monitoring, backup\restore, high availability, etc. And there are plenty of situations arising requiring troubleshooting expertise.

I try and offer some guidelines to SQL Server owners or developers encouraging them to interact with DBAs. These are some starting points

When a sql table has Over Five Million Rows

Five million rows isn’t very large but it indicator of higher usage. If a developer is working with a large data sets  or they predict a higher usage , then contact the DBA. A good DBA can assist in designing with scalability as part of the design. There are all sorts of SQL Server scaling techniques available to the DBA – with most of them requiring little change to the application

When Buying Software or architecting a new system

If there’s a database involved get the DBA involved from the outset. They can assist in capacity planning, performance requirements, security ,database design and working with the vendor to integrate. You’ll probably find the DBA has dealt with similar problems on another application

When a Query Response takes More Than 20 Seconds

When the query response takes greater than 20 seconds, fast forward to the DBA. A good DBA can quickly identify the bottleneck. They can implement some rapid tuning or work with the developer to make suitable changes. Part of performance troubleshooting is asking the right question

The DBA team tend to be a central service, they are working with other people- so there tend to be good opportunities to apply  techniques and fixes across a wider set of servers.

Read More SQL Server troubleshooting

SQL Server – Write everything down during problem troubleshooting

How to report a SQL Server performance problem