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How to Hire a DBA? Your Questions Answered.
Chris Shaw – Recently I posted an article on How to hire a DBA, I followed that up with a sample of questions that I would ask a DBA during an interview. I have presented the How to Hire a DBA as a 60 min session and I the questions that I get are usually consistent and are based around a couple of things.
Free SQL Server Permissions Migration Tool
If you’ve ever had to move logins and permissions or restore them — you know what a tedious job it can be. SQLpermissions is a new free tool from Idera that will really help you speed up the very time-consuming error-prone process of copying or moving those SQL Server logins and permissions. SQLpermissions generates a customizable T-SQL script that will automate the move or copy. You can move one login or a group of logins and apply permissions across all databases on the target server or a single database. Get your copy here.
Corporate Tagging
I’ve been talking here, and in the weekly show, about tagging and how it might be used in the corporate world. Marty wrote in with some additional information:
"This is a whole field by itself in Records Management known as Taxonomy But it can be described as a heirarchic collection of Metadata. There are freely available taxonomies available for Accounting and Healthcare Also see Ontology and Languages like OWL:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/Taxonomy_today,_ROI_tomorrow.html
or hunt around this site http://www.arma.org."
Now, when I go look at these sites, I read them more as best practices for data management and records management (ARMA) and about the fact that, if we could have standardized schemas (ZDNet), it would really help in information mining at the corporate level. This portion also goes to the Master Data Management things we’ve been talking about on the show, with people (including Microsoft) looking to have a layer that abstracts the source of information so you can query and retrieve with standardized naming, without regard to how the data was actually stored… great stuff.
But, what I’m really talking about is more along the lines of true tagging – like what you see in Flickr, YouTube, Google Video, Digg, etc. The ability for users to decide how they classify a bit of informaiton.
Deb wrote to say: "There are a myriad of uses for tagging corporate data. In gathering this type of meta data, we can better determine the correct data source to answer specific business questions. Being able to tag data by subject or functional area is a huge help. Even just classifying it as to who the data steward/data owner is ends up being a big time saver. Also, our enterprise applications are becoming more self-serve and end users are able to easily publish data through tools like SRS Report Building, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server and Excel. Classifying this output is critical to tame the chaos!"
This is really much more along the lines of what I was thinking, though the links above are critical to corporate data stores as well. Are there organizations off doing the infrastructure thinking for corporate data tagging? I don’t know. I’m off to search. I’ll let you know what I find out.
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