Learning DB Management

Hi Darian, this is a perennial question and always worth a discussion. :-) In order to give you the best answer, it helps us a lot to know what your end-goal is for this learning plan.

For example, do you want to know enough to act as a junior DBA? This would mean learning to handle issues of disaster recovery (DR, a.k.a. backup and recovery), uptime, and how to handle the top 10% of performance issues (e.g. deadlocks and blocking chains, killing runaway processes, etc)? That might take 4- to 6-hours to learn. 

On the other hand, you might want to go for a higher skill level. After all, careers in data management pay at the top of IT league tables, second only to cybersecurity. So it might turn out that you want to learn a lot more than the basics. 

Having said that, I can recommend tons of great resources. I just want to scope it properly to your expectations.

Cheers,

-Kev

Hi Darian, this is a perennial question and always worth a discussion. :-) In order to give you the best answer, it helps us a lot to know what your end-goal is for this learning plan.

For example, do you want to know enough to act as a junior DBA? This would mean learning to handle issues of disaster recovery (DR, a.k.a. backup and recovery), uptime, and how to handle the top 10% of performance issues (e.g. deadlocks and blocking chains, killing runaway processes, etc)? That might take 4- to 6-hours to learn. 

On the other hand, you might want to go for a higher skill level. After all, careers in data management pay at the top of IT league tables, second only to cybersecurity. So it might turn out that you want to learn a lot more than the basics. 

Having said that, I can recommend tons of great resources. I just want to scope it properly to your expectations.

Cheers,

-Kev

I see no downside to learning as much as possible about DB management. In the short-term, I really only need base level knowledge to be effective. In the long term, I'd like to achieve the highest level of understanding that I can without neglecting my current career progression. I work in network infrastructure, so I believe that this area of study can only benefit me as a technician.

I can throw in my experience.  I started as a network tech, then ended up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff at work, then got tasked with managing Orion, did that for a while and really got into it.  In the course of having to do things in Orion I didn't like doing things one by one by hand all the time so I poked around in the database essentially doing trial and error learning as I went.  Lots of google searches, used the w3schools sql tutorials often to check syntax, ended up becoming a SW consultant and since I was touching so many environments so often it really reinforced the need to be able to do things consistently, repeatably, and at scale so I continued to learn about database stuff.  Took some of Brent Ozar's courses and others via pluralsight and similar technical learning platforms as my jobs made those available to me. Also ended up getting pretty deep into powershell to round out the skills.

I highly recommend leaning into the DB and scripting skills because it makes orders of magnitude more effective at your jobs and more desirable as an employee.  Being strong in all those areas led me to some really great jobs and I made a ton of money doing the things that most of my peers couldn't.