Yesterday I presented at #SQLSat614 in Christchurch. SQL Saturday was a full day event with 20 experts talking on topics related to the Microsoft Data Platform. Since this wasn’t my normal audience, I thought I’d ask the twitter-sphere what questions DBA’s have when it comes to managing SharePoint and the responses helped formulate my talk.

I attended another session where the speaker raised culture as an important aspect of ‘getting things done’. He spoke about the disconnect between different groups within IT, Ops team vs Dev team vs Systems team etc and how communication is often lacking.

Over the years I’ve seen many instances where people using SharePoint do things that ‘upset’ either the Ops team, DBA or someone else in the team. The is often swiftly followed by finger pointing and limited understanding of each others needs only makes things worse.

The point I would make is that SharePoint is a platform. In many cases a group of people are responsible for different elements of the platform – server infrastructure, SQL servers, backups, administration of SharePoint, site builds, content migrations, governance etc. If we can clearly identify the needs of each team and get better understanding across the group, then things will run more smoothly, especially when a crisis occurs. We want the group to become a team.

This leads me to my presentation, Introduction to SharePoint for DBA’s. I made a deliberate decision not to dive in to deep or create a comprehensive guide covering every aspect of SharePoint that a DBA might need to understand, but just enough that they would see how different it is to other workloads and provide a few tips for doing things better.

I’ll leave you with a few simple rules to remember and a link below to download the presentation. Here are the rules:

• Always use SQL Aliases when installing SharePoint
• Pre-grow your databases for planned data migration or bulk loading
• Create one Site Collections per Content Databases were possible
• Understand your recovery options (see more here)
• Have a regular catch up with your SharePoint admin
• Never update SharePoint databases directly, use the SharePoint UI or API’s

Download Presentation

During the questions I was asked, what is the difference between a DBA and a SharePoint Admin? A difficult question for a guy who spends his days working with SharePoint to answer, when the room is full of DBA’s!

A big thank you to the Microsoft SQL community (#sqlfamily) for having me at their event.