Do We Need A Professional DBA?

[jbl1167]

We are going to upload some queries and tables from Access into SQL Server.

We do have a programmer with SQL Server experience that may work remotely from his house. Do we need to have a SQL Server administrator in house? We do not have a lot of tables or extremely complicated database structures.

 

[Catadmin]

Wow. That's a loaded question. @=)

As a professional DBA, I cringe every time someone tells me "I just want you to do a simple query for me". Usually because the someone in question doesn't understand the scope of what they're asking. Via the application, everything looks neat, organized and simple, so the end user assumes the tables behind the app are just as neat, organized and simple. When they use the word "simple", my reaction is to run and hide because what they want usually takes me a week to dig out of the database.

The problem is what you want to do sounds too broad for anyone to give you a good answer. You're uploading tables from Access to SQL Server. Is SQL already installed? Is it running other things? Are you just importing a few tables & queries or are you upgrading from Access to SQL?

Data types are different (and much more varied) in SQL than they are in Access. Import a table wrong (without doing the proper data transformation) and you can end up with a bunch of nvarchars or floats in your new SQL tables that don't come close to being the original datatypes they were in Access. Remember also that the SQL language used in Access queries is NOT the same as the T-SQL language used to query SQL Server, so more than likely your "few queries" will need to be written.

Can someone with a passing knowledge of SQL Server do all of the above? Probably. Depends on how "passing" his or her knowledge is. However, they'd probably take twice as long as someone whose sole job (as a professional SQL DBA) is to import data from Access or upgrade databases from Access. If you do go for a professional, even if it's a temp contract stint to get you started, make sure that Pro has dealt with Access as well as SQL Server.

But first, before you hire anyone, write down a list of everything that is actually going to be done, by the details. That is what you should use to determine if you truly need to hire the extra hand to do what you want.



Catadmin - MCDBA, MCSA
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