What are the most important things to do in your first 90 days as a database administrator?

It may seem confusing at first even for an expert. Remember that new challenges require new perspectives, so be patient with yourself as you adjust.Don't be too hard on yourself. Try to enjoy your new environment and focus on its benefits.

Focus on one task at a time! Proceed gradually. A new environment provides the perfect opportunity to showcase your skills so do search about the best approach then take action.

Start with addressing the reported issues, such as when stockholders complain about poor performance of a query, prioritize resolving it. This approach helps build trust effectively.

This is the best way to make time for enhancing your knowledge. Monotonous tasks are done by automatic operations. You apply tools to manage your time. I enjoy working with monitoring tools that display colorful messages, helping me quickly understand my server's status.

The most important think that didn't mentioned on this article is to check the backup policy and health of the databases. Many companies forget some databases from backup policy or backup job is broken and doesn't works for months. So you need to check that all user / system databases are getting backups, check backup types depending on each database recovery model and also check backup retention policy.

Make sure there is a tacit understanding between the DBA and the Sysadmins that a mutual defence pact is in place. Developers and "The Data Team" must be brought in line and made suitably subservient. This can most easily be achieved by confiscating the keys to the kingdom under the guise of security, and hiding them behind complex layers of service request, sprint plans and extensive justifications. The longer you can keep them without accesses the more secure your political control. It is also necessary to assure senior manglement of your professional sureties, the easiest way being a prompt recovery from a disastrous performance issue. Preferably caused by aforementioned developers, even if they do deny changing anything 😉

In my previous and current experiences the first thing I do is first try to understand the data architecture. Take the time to make a thorough report on what are things I see that can be improved or done differently. Identify bad practices regarding data modeling, infrastructure, configuration, commands, indexing, backups and recovery, high availability and security strategies. Focus on the problem not the solution and document it well. Right after that I start thinking about possible solutions, document them well and present them to my leaders. Try to propose what I think is the best long term solution even though it'll be hard to implement and my manager might not go along with it.