I read a blog post from Brent Ozar, talking about lessons learned throughout his career. Here is my take.
Consistency is your friend.
When I was doing Lotus Notes consulting, I had a client with virtually zero downtime. They never had the connectivity and replication problems I had seen in other environments, including my own. Their secret? It was consistency in versions. All of their Notes/Domino servers ran the same version, and the clients ran the same version. Today, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but back then, when you had to upgrade everybody via a CD, that was a revolutionary idea. I had always thought that you should install the latest version. My world changed that day.
Today, in my role as a SQL DBA, I try to keep as much consistency across my database servers as possible. When I started at my current employer, we had eight different versions and service pack levels of Microsoft SQL Server. Today, we have two, SQL 2000 SP4 and SQL 2005 SP2. When I upgrade my SQL 2005 instances to SP3, they’ll all go in a very short window.
All of my database servers are backed up using the same methodology and a consistent backup script. If I get hit by a bus, a replacement could come in and quickly figure out what’s going on.
Seek out a higher power.
I was an arrogant kid when I first started. I thought I knew everything. What I didn’t know, I thought I could figure out. Working with me had to have been hell. I’ve learned that not knowing something isn’t a sign of weekness. It’s an opportunity to learn.
People are incredibly willing to help you out when you acknowledge their expertise and approach them with a “help me understand…” attitude. In today’s world of technology, one can’t know everything. I try to be good at my stuff and get help from people who know more about something than I do. Besides, saying you don’t know something makes you look human.
Write early. Write often.
In the world of technology, your work is crap if people can’t understand it. I hate writing documentation, but I have to do it. I’d like to think that should I get hit by a bus, a reasonably skilled DBA could come in and figure out my environment rather quickly. Unless something is documented, it didn’t happen.
The more I write, the better I seem to get at it. This isn’t a bad thing at all.
Know your audience.
I hate reading e-mails I don’t understand. I work for a high tech company, and our engineers talk about networking and TCP/IP using language that goes right over my head. I appreciate reading things in language I understand.
When I send out a notice that we’re upgrading a server, people in this company appreciate knowing that we’re upgrading the firmware on all of our IBM x346 servers. That makes sense to them. At my last employer, a construction management company, all our user community cared about was that a system was going to be down for maintenance. If I had sent out a message stating we were upgrading firmware, my inbox would be flooded with messages asking what the hell I was talking about.