On occasion, an IT personnel (non-DBA) is tasked with providing SQL support.  Either with installation, upgrading, backups, restores, moving databases or other tasks that normally would not fall under their job description, you know the “and other assigned duties”.  Trust me I have been there.  We call these “Accidental DBAs” and sometimes a strange thing happens, the person actually ENJOYS working with MS SQL.  At least that is what happened to me, I was a .NET developer in a corporation with no DBA and over 20 instances of MS SQL in our network.  As the developer, I did primarily did developer tasks: create and/or modify tables, views, stored procedures, etc.; but I did not learn SQL Administration or management until much later.

So, if you are one of those accidental DBAs, where do you find more information on how to do DBA work.  I have always found www.sqlservercentral.com, www.mssqltips.com, and MSFT Documentation  to be invaluable resources to find answers to questions.  I follow some “gurus” of the industry on twitter and their blogs are never boring and always informative.  Some of my personal favorites, to just name a few:

1. Brent Ozar
2. Penal Dave
3. Thomas LaRock
4. Paul Randal

During this series I will hope to provide the following information:

1. Working with a SQL Server checklist.
2. Tools to Manage SQL:  SSMS vs Azure Data Studio vs Visual Code vs PowerShell
3. Document, Document, Document
4. Maintenance plans alternatives because MPs really suck.
5. Secrets to keeping your DBA Job:  Disaster Recovery plan

As of now these are the topics I plan to cover in my Back to Basics series.  Although I reserve the right to edit this, I believe if an “accidental” DBA would learn these, then they could probably drop the “accidental” from their title.