Sometimes there’s a method to my madness. I’ve got a Jr. on my staff who is just now learning the ropes. Now, I don’t mean a Jr. in the sense that he just doesn’t know as much SQL as I do, I mean it in the real sense. He actually knows practically nothing. He’s not even a big Windows guy.

So teaching him can be challenging because where do I start? Do I start with windows, networking, data types, what? Well, I decided to start him on backups. Like many times before I figured that would give him the best chances to learn the basics. See, in any large shop, you do backup/restore constantly. There’s always someone needing a DB backed up or restored to one location or another. So there’s plenty of opportunity to practice. But practicing backup/restore is just one of the reasons I throw beginners into that area. The other reason is to teach them good solid basics all around.

Because along with the plethora of backup/restore in a large environment, there’s also a plethora of problems that go along with it. You try to backup to a location and find out you don’t have enough space so you have to decide what goes and what stays. You try to restore to a DB and you don’t have enough space, so you have to restore different files to different drives. You find one acct doesn’t have permissions to a location, so you have to take care of that. Then you find out that backups have been failing on these boxes over here so you have to look into what happened there. Then you have to work with the tape guy to bring some backups from offsite and try to find space on a server to restore them. Maybe even you have tricky restore that requires some actual thought too. The point is that there are so many pitfalls in backup/restore, that it’s an excellent place to start a beginner. Without even knowing or trying, they learn networking, windows security, SQL security, backup/restore syntax, file rotation methods, space mgmt, DNS, trace flags, and more. It’s a fabulous way to begin your career as a DBA.

Now, why am I so happy? Well because in this case my Jr. was talking to someone and trying to explain to them why he couldn’t restore their DB the way they wanted. He actually did a pretty good job. When he was finished, he looked over to see me smiling at him. He instantly said, what? I said, oh nothing. Then he’s like, then why are you staring at me. I said, did you hear what you just said to that guy? He goes, no. I was just explaining to him why I couldn’t restore his DB the way the needed. I said, ok, and why is that. He went on to explain to me what the problem was. I said, ok then how can we fix that. He said, well under the current circumstances we really can’t. That’s what I was trying to explain to him. I just smiled again. He said, what? Why do you keep doing that?

I said, look at you. 2 months ago you wouldn’t have been able to do that much less explain it. I never taught you that, where did you come up with it? He said, well I’ve done it so much and I’ve just learned that… all of a sudden his eyes got really wide. He looked at me and said… OHHHHH so that’s why you want me doing all the backup/restore. Because I learn all this other stuff with it. I said now you’re getting it. And it’s just cool to see that it’s working.

This is what I’m talking about when I talk about mentoring. A good mentor can show you where you need to go in the order you need it. And I’m not bragging, I’m just saying that it takes more than just reading books. You have to be with someone who’s been there a couple times. He can teach you how to think like a DBA. Hell, I’ve learned all my .NET from books and blog samples, and I actually suck. I get things done, but I’m no real coder in any sense of the word. Well, I’m on the receiving end of that now cause our big .NET guy at work ahs been showing me things and actually mentoring me a little, and it’s really cool the things I don’t nkokw. So I’m even getting it a little myself. Cool stuff that.