How do you know if you need a full-time DBA?
Real-world experiences from Bev – and how THEY knew it was time – "We are about 2 years into our SharePoint implementation. We are a school board and the plan here is to use the sharepoint environment for all collaboration and document storage etc. for all administrative, teaching, student and parent use. As well as to move our existing external facing website to SharePoint.
Yes, things started out really small with maybe a dozen databases. It soon became clear that with 15,000 employees needing mysites that perhaps another 40 content dbs for staff mysites would be a good idea. Then for team sites maybe another 10 or so dbs for each of the 10 departments and then for temporary lite sites we needed more dbs. Anyway, we are up to some 90 or so dbs now.
Of course one never runs with just a production environment and hence we have test and qac (both much smaller scale) that need to keep running, patched, backed up and performing.
Adding space to a server with 90 databases is an ongoing monitoring situation. Who can afford to simply save aside your anticipated amount of expensive filer storage until you eventually use it? Thus you have to develop a way to stay ahead of the growth, increasing databases and adding storage as needed. And you have to backup all these databases and transaction logs with some sort of process that is fully monitored for errors. And you have to manage security because with SharePoint administrators and server administrators battling problems constantly you will find extra security and login accounts showing up on your database servers.
SharePoint also recommends reorganizing indexes and you will have to set up this job as well and ensure it keeps running.
It seems that development of a SharePoint environment from the application side (not the DBA’s job) is quite heavy in at least the initial stages. We have a team of developers here enabling features and handing out team sites.
We had one situation where we needed to restore the entire set of the 40 content dbs to a specific point in time because a part of the SharePoint configuration was dropped.
Okay, now when deciding whether you need a full time dba to manage this also involves looking at what else you are running in your organization and how many DBAs you have to support what you are already running. So you can’t simply say does something take a full time DBA? This sounds like you don’t need a DBA at all and that if you have a DBA they are probably not doing anything else.
The right question to ask is, for an organization that already has critical databases and multiple database environments running, does your dba staff have the cycles available to manage, maintain and keep running a small/medium/large (chose one) SharePoint database environment? In our case, we were already maxed out running the sql server environments we had. We lasted about a year and then I realized that we were barely watching what was going on in our SharePoint world. Of course very little had gone live and was in use so we were okay. But I could not say that anyone of my staff had a minute of their day to get their heads around what was going on in each of the 3 environments let alone the production one.
Thus the project brought in portal DBA to support the environment.
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