So... you want to be Sybase ASE DBA?

There's quite some demand for Sybase ASE DBAs, and I frequently getquestions from interested-but-new-to-Sybase folks to please 'explainhow Sybase works' (or, when they're really new, 'explain how the SyBase works' -- sorry for poking fun).
Now, that happens to be somewhat too big a question for a shortemail reply, but it made me realize some guidance for potential newDBAs could be useful, if only to make it easier to give these folks auseful answer. The information below is an attempt in that direction.



What is a DBA?

That's indeed a pretty good first question.
The answer differs from organisation to organisation, but I'dassert that, irrespective of the organisation, application or databasebrand, a DBA is generally seen as the person who watches over thehealth of a database system on a regular, if not continuous, basis.Here, 'health' includes things like ensuring the database server isrunning and serving application queries, which in turn means keeping aneye on the transaction logs or data segments not being full, absence oflock contention, monitoring the database log file for error messagesfor etc. Essential is also ensuring that backups are made and otherhousekeeping jobs are taken care of.
Then, there are life-cycle tasks like added/removing users andchanging passwords, installing new/changed applications (i.e. storedprocedures/triggers), performing software upgrades.
DBA duties may also include performance monitoring and -tuning,participation in development projects, systems design, maintain contactwith the DB vendor's technical support, and pretty much any otheraspects of IT activity around a database system.
Ideally, everything is working just fine and DBAs have plenty oftime to check out the latest blogs and stay current on the technology.In reality however, a DBA's schedule often appears to beinterrupt-driven, as he/she needs to respond to calls for assistencefor users, system designers or management.
(DBA is short for ase administrator, in case you were wondering)


Why should an organization need a DBA in the first place?
The answer is that a database is not just a stand-alone piece ofsoftware, but a complex, dynamic product which sits as a spider in theweb of applications. Because the database is the place where the datais stored, it tends to be of crucial importance for many applications.Each of these applications may use the database for different purposes,with different access patterns, different workload levels, anddifferent expectations around response times and availability.Databases tend to respond dynamically to the workload they're beinggiven.
In other words, the database is the place where many threads (as in:non-technical; figure of speech) of an organisation's IT system cometogether, meaning it is also the place where many interests, designdecisions, politics or technology limitations converge -- or collide.This all means that a database system needs to be managed, rather thanleft alone, in order to guarantee applications keep working as they areexpected to.
To put it differently: if the database stopped responding, howmuch trouble would that cause to your organisation? Well, that's whyyou need a DBA.


What experience do I need to become a DBA?
Anyone can be a DBA, but I'd say that some amount of IT training isrequired. However, as everywhere in IT you'll find DBAs with greatlyvarying backgrounds (one of my highly respected former collegues atSybase started her career as a social worker).
However, a more important requirement than your original professionaltraining is to have some practical experience in IT. In general, yourfirst job in IT will rarely be that of a DBA.
Because, as described above, many interests converge around thedatabase, a problem can seldom be considered in total isolation, andwhen something happens, it generally needs to be addressed urgently.Having practical IT experience will be greatly useful to deal with thechallenges faced by DBAs.
In general, having some hard-technical IT experience(programming, for example, irrespective of the programming language)will be very useful for becoming a DBA; having some project-levelexperience is definitely useful too.
Since experienced IT personnel is in short supply, the sameapplies to DBAs -- especially good ones. I'd define a 'good' DBA as onethat can manage all the technical, organisational and politicalaspects, while staying current with the technological developments,without losing his health or sanity.


How does Sybase ASE differ from other databases?
All of today's major relational database brands are -roughly speaking-based on the same underlying technology (keywords: relational databasetheory; entity-relationship diagrams; SQL; Codd & Date; referentialintegrity). Consequently, there are many similarities between variousbrands of databases. However, that does not mean that when you know onedatabase, you also know the others: databases are complex pieces ofsoftware with many features and optimizations, and each database vendorhas gone its own way in these areas.
This is especially true for DBA tasks. Although the concepts of aDBA's task are broadly similar for any database, the actual syntax anddetails to perform a similar type of task may require vastly differentcommands in different databases.
As for Sybase ASE, it should be noted this is a database formission-critical, enterprise-level applications. In short: ASE cansupport thousands of concurrently active users, run on the heaviesthardware available (e.g. Sun E25000, HP Superdome, etc.) while beinghighly scalable (ASE has proven scalability to more than 100 CPUs) andmanaging terabytes of data with guaranteed sub-second response times.Moreover, should the power drop or a hardware failure occur, thedatabase's integrity should never be compromised, and any committedapplication transactions should never be lost.
(to avoid misunderstandings: ASE also runs extremely well onsmaller systems like 1/2/4-CPU Linux boxes; currently this is in fact arather successful area for ASE)
It is the ability to fulfill this sort of requirement that makesthe difference between an enterprise-level database like Sybase ASE,and some of the open-source databases that entered the market in recentyears; the latter tend to be distinctly less robust, reliable orscalable than ASE.
Among the enterprise databases, Sybase ASE stands out because it is loteasier to manage (compared with Oracle and DB2 for example), because itruns on all platforms (unlike MS-SQL Server -- which, since it runsonly on Windows, is indeed sometimes questioned whether to qualify asan enterprise DB), delivers more performance from the same hardware(compared to Oracle and DB2).
Because Sybase ASE requires significantly less DBA effort than otherdatabases, ASE is very well suited for smaller systems too (where lessDBA capacity may be available).


What are good places to find a job as a Sybase DBA?
Sybase ASE is especially strong in the financial industry, i.e.banking and insurance. Consequently, high concentrations of Sybase DBAsare found around the major stock exchanges including (but by no meanslimited to) Tokyo, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London, New York.
Large Sybase customers typically run mission-critical systems onASE (more than 50% of all Wall St. trades are still done on ASE-basedsystems). Investment banks tend to have securities trading systems inall major stock exchanges, and these systems are often connectedthrough Sybase Replication Server. Such customers often have 24/7 DBArequirements and sometimes employ hundreds of DBAs around the world.DBA salaries can be very good for such positions.
Apart from the financial industry, ASE is used in literally everyline of business, government or industry. As such, you may findopportunites for ASE DBAs anywhere. Sybase books are used in at least 70 countries (that I know of) varying from Zambiato Alaska, and from French Polynesia to the Cayman Islands -- andliterally anywhere in between.
It should be noted that DBA recruitment (either permanent orcontract) is often done informally -- you don't tend to see many adsthese days. Instead, employers and recruiters google around (sometimesI get the impression that's the only thing recruiters do), so having anonline CV somewhere will greatly help your chances of being spotted. Ofcourse, connecting with ISUG or with a local Sybase User Group will be useful for your network anyway.
Because many ASE systems are used for mission-critical,revenue-generating systems, salaries or contract rates for Sybase DBAsare generally quite good when comparing with DBA jobs for otherdatabases. Knowledge of, and experience with, ASE performance tuningand/or Replication Server definitely get you higher rates.


Becoming a Sybase DBA: Some easy first steps to start...
In order to get started as Sybase ASE DBA, you will need to put insome effort. This means: get hands-on experience with ASE, and learnhow to create a server, create databases, administrate logins, etc. Thesteps below are aimed to get you started and guide you in the rightdirection; by no means does this constitute a ful DBA course ortraining.
The good news is that you can do this on your own PC at home,without having to buy any software licenses first -- you will need abroadband connection to do some downloading however.
Playing with an ASE test server will of course not get youreal-life DBA experience, but it does allow you to get some productexperience which is a necessary first step.
I'll go through the first few steps in detail, especially for those who are new to ASE.

• First, get yourself a free copy of Sybase ASE. These areavailable for Windows, Linux and Solaris x86 in the form of either thefree-for-production ASE Express Edition or thealso-free-but-not-for-production Developer's Edition.
• What you've downloaded is the ASE software product, whichyou must install on your system first before you can do anything withit. Follow the instructions -- it's pretty simple and takes no morethan 5-10 minutes. If given a choice, install the 'Full' product.
  There may be two things to install -- the Sybase server and the 'PCclient'. You definitely need the server as this contains the ASEsoftware; the PC Client contains a GUI tool ('Sybase Central') andvarious drivers (OLEDB, ODBC) which you don't immediately need at thisstage. Feel free to install the PC Client anyway since it won't harm.Note that the PC Client is for Windows only.

• Once installed, you should have a Sybase directory tree onyour disk. The actual pathname depends on what you specified during theinstallation dialog, for example C:\sybase (Windows) or /opt/sybase(Linux). Check you have these.
  On Windows, open a new DOS box andcheck there's environment variables %SYBASE% and %SYBASE_ASE% now (aswell as a few others). On Linux, make sure your shell has $SYBASE,$SYBASE_ASE etc. defined -- look for scripts named SYBASE.sh orSYBASE.csh in the top-level installation directory. Make sure to callthese before doing anything with ASE.

• Now that you have installed the software, yopu can finallycreate a Sybase ASE server. Follow the instructions that come with thedownloaded software, or pick up some documentation from sybase.com --

• When you have created your ASE server, make sure it isstarted (check the docs). Now comes the proof of the pudding: run aquery.
  For this, you need to run the
  isql
  client tool in a DOS box or shell session (remember that ASE has aclient-server architecture, and you can only talk to the server througha client program).
  With
  isql
  , run the following on the command line: isql -U sa -P -Sxxxx (
  xxxx
  is the name of the server specified while created it)
  
  When successfully connected to the ASE server, you will see this prompt: 1> Type the following at this prompt: select 'Hello World!' ... then hit , type 'go' (without the quotes) and hit again. The result should look like this:1> select 'Hello World!'
  2> go
  
  ------------
  Hello World!
  
  (1 row affected)
  What's happened is that you've sent a SQL 'select' statement to the ASEserver, which echoes the string 'Hello World!' back to the client.
  
  When you've come this far: congrats! You've cleared the first hurdlesand you're well on your way to getting acquainted with Sybase ASE.
  
  Instead of running a query with the command-line tool
  isql
  ,you may also use a GUI tool, if you installed the PC client. This maybe called 'Interactive SQL' or 'SQL Advantage' and can be found underthe Start->Programs->Sybase. There's actually also a Java-basedGUI tool in the Linux distribution: look for
  $SYBASE/DBISQL/bin/dbisql
  or
  $SYBASE/jutils-2_0/jisql/jisql
  .
  However, as a Sybase ASE DBA, you will need to be able to work primarily with the ASCII-interface of
  isql
  , so make sure you're able to do that.

• Now that you're able to run SQL queries, you'll need to findyour way around the ASE server and understand its structure (an ASEserver contains various databases). Play with the following SQLcommands, and look up their meaning in the documentation :sp_who -- all current sessions in the ASE server
  go
  
  select @@spid -- this is your session
  go
  
  select suser_name() -- the username you're logged in with
  go
  
  select getdate() -- what's the time?
  go
  
  select convert(varchar,getdate(),109) -- what's the time precisely?
  go
  
  sp_helpdb -- list of databases in this server
  go
  
  sp_helpdevice -- list of the disk files used by this ASE server
  go
  Also run these queries non-interactively, i.e. put them in afile (including the 'go' on a separate line) and run them with the
  -i yourfilename
  option of
  isql
  . Also use the
  -o
  option of
  isql
  to redirect the query results to a file.

• Create your own database to mess around (never create tables etc. in the 'master' database):create database mydb
  go
  
  use mydb
  go
  
  select db_name() -- this should return 'mydb'
  go
  
  create table mytab (mycol int, mystring varchar(40), when_added datetime)
  go
  
  sp_help
  go
  
  sp_help mytab
  go
  
  select * from sysobjects where name = 'mytab'
  go
  
  insert mytab values (1, 'my first row', getdate())
  go
  insert mytab values (2, 'my second row', getdate())
  go
  insert mytab values (3, 'my third -- getting boring now', getdate())
  go
  
  select * from mytab
  go
  

• Create another login:use master
  go
  
  sp_addlogin yourname, yoursecretpassword
  go
  
  use mydb
  go
  
  sp_adduser yourname -- needed to get access to database 'mydb'
  go
  
  Now log out (or start a new
  isql
  session) and log in with the new account: isql -U yourname -P yoursecretpassword -Sxxxx (
  xxxx
  is your server's name)
  Now do the following:sp_who -- all current sessions in the ASE server
  go
  
  select @@spid -- this is your session
  go
  
  select suser_name() -- the username you're logged in with
  go
  
  use mydb
  go
  
  select * from mytab
  go
  
  insert mytab values (4, 'my 4th row....', getdate())
  go
  
  select * from mytab
  go
  Note that your new account does not have the same priviliges asthe all-mighty 'sa' login you started off with -- which is why thislast insert above will fail. Granting priviliges is a topic for later.
  As a DBA, you'll typically be working under the 'sa' login,which has all priviliges out-of-the-box. Do the following things as'sa' again:

• Let's get rid of that login again (make sure you're logged in as 'sa' when doing this, or it will fail):select name from master..syslogins --show all existing logins
  go
  
  sp_displaylogin yourname
  go
  
  use mydb
  go
  
  sp_dropuser yourname -- remove yourself from this database
  go
  
  use master
  go
  
  sp_droplogin yourname -- drop the login
  go

Some further steps...
By now, you should have some appreciation of what it is like to workwith Sybase ASE. The next steps are to figure out how to perform somebasic DBA tasks, like those below.When you've managed to do all that (googling the Sybase newsgroups willoften give you some answers), then you've made some major steps towardsbecoming a Sybase ASE DBA.
These are some common things a Sybase DBA should be able to do:

• Start & stop a server
• Start the 'Backup Server', and make a database dump (= a backup of a database)
• Load this database dump again (i.e. restore the backup)
• Locate the ASE errorlog and look what's in it
• Writea SQL query to determine the names of all tables in a database, and usethis to generate and execute 'update statistics' commands for all thosetables
• Create 'cron' jobs (Unix) or scheduled Windows jobsto run 'update statistics' on all tables and to make database dumps ofall user databases (plus the 'master' database)

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