Week Seven Onwards
- Jun 24, 2025
- 2 min read
The first six weeks in a new DBA role are often a blur, equal parts learning, adjusting, and firefighting. There’s a lot to take in: unfamiliar systems, unique quirks in the environment, new tools to integrate into your day-to-day. But now that I’ve made it through that initial stretch, things are starting to click.
Before we talk about what’s next, here’s a quick look back.
Week-by-Week Recap
Week 1: Starting Fresh and Picking the Right Tools
My focus this week was mostly orientation; learning the architecture, spotting early pain points, and identifying the tools I’d lean on..
Week 2: Laying the Groundwork
This was where I built out my priority checklist; covering alerting, indexing, data retention, and job reviews. It was mostly about stabilizing things and plugging gaps without making risky changes.
Week 3: Baselining with Diagnostics
I split this week into two parts. First, I used Glenn Berry’s diagnostic queries to get a sense of CPU usage, I/O hotspots, and wait stats. Then, I used Microsoft’s SQL Server Best Practices Checker to confirm config issues and flag missing indexes. Great for surfacing issues, just not deep enough for fine-grained tuning yet.
Week 4: Smarter Monitoring with sp_WhoIsActive
Here I put sp_WhoIsActive to work in an automated job that logs long-running queries to a table. This let me track live issues without disrupting performance. One of those “small effort, big payoff” tools I’d recommend to any DBA.
Week 5: Partitioning Large Tables Without Regret
Scaling up to bigger VMs helped a little, but we still had IO contention and latch waits. The real shift came with table partitioning, hybrid compression, and the right indexes. Trimming bloat, reducing blocking, and speeding up inserts (this was the first big architectural win).
Week 6: Deep Dive with Brent Ozar’s sp_BlitzIndex
I used sp_BlitzIndex to identify duplicate indexes, unused ones, and missing coverage. It helped me clean things up with confidence.
Week 7 and On
Now that I’ve built some momentum, it’s time to take on bigger, longer-term tasks:
Designing upgrades from SQL Server 2019 → 2022
Building out a staging environment with anonymized production data
Automating schema deployments across dev, staging, and prod
Hardening SQL Server ahead of an upcoming security audit
Planning an AlwaysOn AG async setup for cross-region replication
Some of these are already underway, others need scoping. But the foundation is there.
Week 2 Checklist Revisited
Let’s look back at what’s already moving forward.
Done:
Alerts for SQL service or Agent outages
Notifications for long-running queries
AG node routing alerts and synchronization delays
IO improvements via table partitioning
Still in Progress:
Vulnerability assessments
Deployment automation
Security hardening
Final Thoughts (So Far)
At the start, most of my time was spent reacting. Now I’m steering.
There’s still a long list of things to improve, but I’m finally past the “just trying to keep it from breaking” phase. That breathing room lets you think clearer, build smarter, and maybe even sleep a little better.
More updates soon as new projects roll in, and old ones (hopefully) close out.
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