12 Most Important Questions a CIO should be asking their DBA 

How to identify business critical tasks that are being overlooked. 

 

As a CIO you oversee a lot of personnel. Sysadmins, network engineers, DevOps, application developers, and of course your Databasemore-focus-is-being-placed-upon-the-Database-Administrator-and-Data-Engineers Administrators all need supervision. As data becomes ever more important, more focus is being placed upon the Database Administrator and Data Scientists. 

DBAs are often pulled into a million different directions by the rest of your IT Team, as well as clients and other departments. Standing up new servers, handling interdepartmental requests, assisting the CISO team, putting out fires, building architecture, writing new code for the application team, and never taking a vacation are common job duties. 

It’s very possible Business-Critical tasks are being skipped. Most often these tasks are missed for a few simple reasons:

  1. The DBA is too busy with other tasks to get to them
  2. The DBA has not received a notification that the task has failed
  3. The DBA is entry or mid-level and unable to perform these tasks, was never trained on them or is unaware there’s a problem.

 

Identifying these issues before they become a problem and resolving them is critical to business success. 
 
So as soon as you can, have a meeting with your DBA and run through these questions. 

  1. Are you ok? Note this includes the number of hours worked in an average week.
  2. What is the overall health of our data environment?
  3. Is there a specific job, report, or query that is causing us trouble that I should be aware of?
  4. What is our maintenance schedule? Is there anything that can’t be done in your window?
  5. When was the last time we ran corruption checks?
  6. Is our data restorable? When was the last time this was tested?
  7. How often do we back up our data? Are we meeting RTO/RPO?
  8. What types of alerts are set up, and how are they being received?
  9. Are we doing regular performance and tuning on each server? Are you tracking it in a way we can verify?
  10. Is our architecture scalable? How did you confirm that?
  11. Are we utilizing our data efficiently? Can we visualize or analyze it better?
  12. Are there any SAAS products that would make you more efficient or improve our uptime?

BONUS

  1. How can I help you? (Be sure to ask about providing ADDITIONAL TRAINING to keep your Database Administrator in top form and ready to scale your company)