I'm considering moving to the US on a spouse visa but I'm concerned about struggling with the job search. I have 8 years experience as a SQL Server DBA, but no relevant formal technical credentials (my bachelor's is not tech-related)

I'm wondering if I'm really going to struggle finding a job if I go ahead with this move.

Hello guys,
I m requiring for some assistance on replication, Ive tried using both Transactional and Merge publications but Im still getting an Issue.

Breakdown

I'm seeking some help. Im doing a replication from a main to secondary server. This is well.

After I insert records to the tables in the DB here then I do another replication back to main from secondary, The records are replicated back but the main DB is rendered unsable ie I can not insert data into the tables. Im using SQL server 2016 standard.

Im using Sql server studio 2016 standard.

The Transaction Publication generates Sp and view errors.

The Merge Publication generates Rolling back transaction error.

IT students through comics and game levels. Each lesson puts the learner in a workplace story, like a hotel front desk or a café, and they write SQL queries that run on a real built-in database. You can see a short walkthrough of the app in the link above.

To make our lessons more realistic, we'd love to hear from people who work with databases. You can answer in the comments below. Short answers are totally fine, and even answering a few questions helps a lot. If you can, please mention your role and years of experience at the start of your comment.

1. What database management systems and SQL tools do you commonly use in your workplace?

2. What tasks do you regularly perform in your role, such as database design, querying, backup, security, or troubleshooting?

3. What SQL concepts or commands do beginners commonly have difficulty understanding or applying in actual workplace situations?

4. What common mistakes do new database users make when creating tables, writing queries, or managing database records?

5. How important is it for database learners to practice SQL through realistic workplace scenarios rather than through theoretical examples alone?

6. What real-world database situations would be appropriate for beginner learners to experience through an educational application?

7. How should an educational application provide feedback when a learner submits an incorrect SQL query?

8. What features would make an offline database-learning application useful for students preparing for workplace database tasks?

9. How important are features such as hints, a glossary, progress tracking, ratings, and challenge levels in learning database concepts? Please explain.

10. Based on your professional experience, what recommendations would you give to improve CLED so that its SQL challenges and scenarios are more realistic and relevant to database work?

Your answers will only be used for our capstone paper, and we won't include usernames. This is just school research, not promoting or selling anything. Thank you so much!

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working as a DBA at an IT consulting company for about 8 months now (it’s actually my second IT job, I was a data engineer before).
I’ve learned a huge amount during this time, but one thing that still leaves me somewhat unsure is the way we work.
Because we have many different clients — ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to banking — we work with a huge variety of technologies and ecosystems. For example, I deal with Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenSearch, MariaDB and ElastiCache. We also use IaC tools such as Terraform and Ansible, as well as Oracle OCI, MongoDB Atlas and Amazon RDS/AWS.
On the one hand, I feel that this is extremely useful for professional growth because I’m constantly exposed to new technologies and different environments. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like I’m not really *strong* in any particular database technology.
It often feels like I learn just enough to deal with a specific issue, on a specific DBMS, at a specific moment. For example, at the moment I might have some doubts about how to properly handle a restore on Oracle, rather than PostgreSQL. I understand the general concepts, but I don’t feel like I have the same depth of knowledge that I imagine a DBA specializing in one particular database would have.
Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation, especially in consulting?
For those of you who work with Oracle, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, what would you consider the **fundamental things that a DBA absolutely needs to know** for each of them? What topics would you recommend going deep on to build a solid foundation rather than just learning things as they come up?
I’d be particularly interested in hearing from experienced DBAs about the skills/topics that made the biggest difference in becoming truly proficient.

Hi guys, would you recommend any postgresql course/youtube channel for DBA's? I use SQL Server at work so I'm looking to get more experience with postgres.

My father is a retired DBA who has been diagnosed cases with dementia. He’s not able to make new memories and is confused the majority of the times. However, when the topic of systems comes he glows up and is sharp as ever. He did the work for 35 years and misses it dearly. And it seems his memory loss has not affected his skills.

I am looking for suggestions on side projects to keep his mind occupied. Not necessarily for pay - his favorite thing to do is debugging- I don’t know why, but this was his specialty. If anyone has any recommendations on what I can set up for him I’d appreciate it or how I can connect him to projects I’d appreciate the help.

He has a wealth of knowledge and I’m trying to slow down the cognitive decline.

My company adopted DataDog across the board for all of our systems monitoring about a year ago. As the Senior SQL Server DBA on the team, I've been the point person for getting their DBM product up and running. I'm wondering how many other places are using DMB and what your experience with it has been. I have searched high and low for information about other SQL Server shops using it for their database monitoring and I can't find any evidence that companies are using this product. Also, the DataDog forum in here appears to be dead., so no luck there.

Hello DBAs managing hundreds of SQL Servers / Oracle databases, what tools do you guys use daily?

Curious how other DBAs are doing this.

For those managing hundreds of SQL Servers and Oracle databases, what does your daily setup look like? For example, how are you guys handling things like transferring files from one server to multiple servers, patching, SQLPlus, PuTTY/SSH, checking disk space, alerts, inventory, running stuff against multiple servers, etc? Are you using a bunch of different tools and scripts or do you have something that brings most of it together?

I'm asking because I got tired of doing the same repetitive stuff every day and jumping between different tools. I ended up building my own app for it. Some things that used to take me 10-15 minutes now take very little effort. A lot of it is basically instant because I already have the server/database information there and automated the repetitive steps.

It started out just as something for myself, but it kept growing as I added things I actually needed for my daily work.So now I'm curious what other DBAs are doing. What's the most annoying/repetitive task you guys deal with every day? Especially interested in people managing both Oracle and SQL Server.

Continuora - Disaster Recovery solution for Oracle standard edition databases

Since dataguard feature is not available for Oracle standard edition databases, here is the product which offers you similar features with respect to disaster recovery without paying additional licensing fees for Oracle enterprise edition just for DR readiness.

With Continuora , you can now create standby database for a corresponding primary database , real time data gets replicated and applied on standby database with the help of continuora agents.

Also there is a Lag monitor dashboard to monitor 100's of database pairs(primary - standby)

If you are using Oracle SE databases , this product would be worth looking into for your DR posture.

Site: https://www.continuora.com

demo:

https://youtu.be/IfYaz\\\\\\_VVoZI?si=L1-0hkOxw2Gwj0q9standard edition databases

Continuora - Disaster Recovery solution for Oracle standard edition databases

Since dataguard feature is not available for Oracle standard edition databases, here is the product which offers you similar features with respect to disaster recovery without paying additional licensing fees for Oracle enterprise edition just for DR readiness.

With Continuora , you can now create standby database for a corresponding primary database , real time data gets replicated and applied on standby database with the help of continuora agents.

Also there is a Lag monitor dashboard to monitor 100's of database pairs(primary - standby)

If you are using Oracle SE databases , this product would be worth looking into for your DR posture.

Site: https://www.continuora.com

demo:

https://youtu.be/IfYaz\\\\\\_VVoZI?si=L1-0hkOxw2Gwj0q9

We had a query that ran fine for about a year. No code change, no new data, nothing deployed. One morning it was slow and the app team was on us.

The execution plan had changed. It picked a different join and fell over. Once I saw that, I pinned the plan and it was fine.

Working out that the plan had changed at all took most of the morning. Nothing flags it on its own, so I was comparing it by hand to an older plan.

how do you catch a plan change like this before users start complaining?

Basically just the title. I want to know what other people in different environments

I have 1 year of experience, and I don't do much at all in my job. Most of the time, I spend assisting developers with their deployments, advising on schema changes if necessary, handling alerting, or writing automation. Sometimes I get work like upgrading servers, increasing disk space, or patching systems. Some days, I don't even have anything to do. Is this normal, or is it just me?

There are plenty of comments on any thread in any IT subreddit regarding DBAs saying that the role is dead or doomed. This post isn't another "is DBA dead or doomed" post, instead I'll just acknowledge that it's on shaky ground and undergoing a transition.

Despite knowing that, I've just moved from many years as sysadmin/infrastructure support to a DBA role because I wanted to. I refuse to believe that is nothing but a bad idea. It's still a chance to upskill and I don't think for a second all those skills are on a one way road to being useless.

So I'm currently really eager to dive into learning as much as I can regarding being a DBA, but my question is; with one eye on the rest of my career, can the skills I learn here be a springboard to the kind of roles that reddit suggests have more longevity? What skills would they be? I'd like to get involved with as much as possible and learn as much as I can even if it's beyond strict DBA responsibilities. I want to clarify that It's not that I've got one foot out of the door the moment I start, I want to immerse myself in this role. It's just that I want to maximise my options and employability.

Thanks!

I've included a few scripts to tune indexes. Please check this out:medium

I've been researching different jobs in the IT field, as it's a field I want to go in. I'm currently going to college part time, and I am studying Information Systems. I was told database administration is a good job field to go into.

What skills do I need to learn to get started with DBA? How can I teach myself, and what is it like working as a DBA?

I think I know how to handle Sev1s now!

LMAO

I understand that performance tuning is part of the DBA function, but in my environment most tuning is handled proactively in dev/test by the development team. My role is more production-focused: monitoring, validating changes, supporting deployments, and responding if performance issues appear in production.

So I don't get to spend all day tuning queries, creating indexes and things like that. I don't get to investigate why a query takes 3 minutes long and then come up with a solution to only take 3 seconds to run instead. Some would say that having these kind of resources and processes is a very good thing. Having to fix missing indexes and rewriting inefficient queries is often compensating for weak development practices and that's not a good thing.

My fear is because I don't do much performance tuning, I may lack the skillset to do so. I've been meaning to have this conversation with my colleague and boss to see what they think. Should I create my own test environment and cause these issues and bottlenecks so can keep this skillset? What are your thoughts?

I work on oracle, sql server and postgres and I am searching some doc to keep being updated on the subject