It’s late in the day; 10 minutes before you are to leave to start your weekend and what happens…….a SQL Server failure has occurred. Your phone begins to ring off the hook, your boss and his boss are now at your desk standing over your shoulder inquiring as to what happened, the business unit is now emailing 100 times over saying they need into the system now. Has this situation ever happened to you? Well, I hope nothing ever does, but if it has join the club and if it hasn’t get ready cause it will.
I am very big on being pro-active instead of re-active to issues. I’d rather have a document in my hand that is a legitimate well thought through checklist to run down in critical situations so I’m not running around like a basket case that I’ve seen so many people do. One of the first things that I ask people when I get to a new place of employment is, “How is the teams documentation?” Nine times out of ten the response is “What documentation?”
If you don’t currently have a checklist, I strongly recommend one; if you do have a checklist then look for ways to improve the process.
Every DBA should have some mentor so to speak, someone who has been through the trenches before I’ll list several of ones I look up to here in a minute, but you can get so many good ideas from people in the SQL community. I strongly suggest taking advantage of every tool out there. I’m a huge Brent Ozar fan so I want to share his idea of a checklist with you….now I modeled mine after his but took some stuff out and added some stuff in that I believed fit my business need. The article if I’m not mistaken actually is presented by Kendra Little. You can access the article here
Some DBA’s that I really enjoy following are:
"You are the CEO of your destiny" 
Good collection of tips here. Keep it up, and thank you for the kind words.
Chris Shaw