What does database engineer do everyday? (if you are please come in and I have some questions regarding SQL for you)

[mrchow19910319]

I am learning SQL recently, of course, there are tons of online video tutorials about it, the one I am following is the khan academy one. 

I have learned the basics stuff, how to create new tables, join two tables, select some of the elements in there. 

 

What I have not know is what does database engineer do everyday? 

I want the more specific answer, not like: "yeah, we deal with database all the time and delete elements/ sort things out ". 

 

For example do you open Sequel Pro and edit in there? Or you download some database file from github and edit it in atom then re-upload it back??

I am familiar (sort of) with web development, I know if I want to design a website, I need to 

 

1. create HTML CSS JS file write shit in it

2. open browser and see what it looks like

3. upload the shit to some server or something like that.

 

But when it comes to SQL I have no idea. 

Could someone walk me through it? 

 

 

[jj9987]

One of my tasks is managing our company's databases, so I can give a bit of an overview. To be clear, we are a small company and we like to K.I.S.S - keep it stupid simple (or keep it simple, stupid, I'm not sure). In larger companies, DBAs work together with data architects to find the most optimal solution for storing and accessing data, running big data analysis, but also sysadmins, to make sure underlying system is working correctly. That really depends on the infrastructure and how it is set up.

 

So, first point is managing the database. Making sure it has enough resources, it is not running out of disk space and allocating more if necessary. Depending on the size of the company, there might be a dedicated team who manages all the disk storage. In our case, we don't - we just add gigabytes and we are good for a while.

 

On daily basis, I monitor the database. We have configured a bunch of monitoring applications, that keep an eye on performance numbers (CPU, memory, disk usage, transactions count), connections count, bandwidth usage and much more. Some of these are monitored automatically and if any of these goes out of spec, we get a notification on our phones. Others I check every (other) day (which is pretty much reading graphs and takes 2-3 minutes) and make sure everything is running optimally.

 

Now, speaking of the database itself. There is no specific routine what we do every day. On most days, there isn't anything that needs doing on the database (we only have about 4). Maybe few times a month, we do minor changes in the database, as in adding or changing a row. Anything bigger is carried out via database migrations, so that all changes are reviewed and approved by others. We do need to create complicated SQL queries every now and then, to get the most recent data as cheap as possible (so minimal time and network bandwidth consumption) while also getting all the data from multiple tables (e.g. single SQL over 4-5 tables).

 

As a general rule, we avoid accessing production database directly as much as possible and use database migrations instead. This is mostly for security purposes (so we do not need to keep active credentials), but also for historical purposes, so that we have a record of who carried out and what changes were made. This is stored in a git repository.

 

In our team, we use command line tools for directly accessing databases, that is psql for PostgreSQL and mysql for MySQL. GUIs are slow, bulky and often hard to find the correct buttons/features. Command-line tools also allow you to write scripts, so if there is a task you need to do often and requires 5 commands, you can combine that to one.

 

That is pretty short and very simplified overview of what I do. I highly recommend checking out r/Database (also has links to database-specific subreddits) and maybe also r/sysadmin, there are a lot of guys hanging around there, who can describe their jobs as well.

[MrJoosh]

I'm not what you'd call a "Database Engineer" but I work within the data team of a company with a fairly large Teradata data warehouse.

 

My job is split fairly consistently between DBA work and development of ETL and data transformation code.

 

Day to day tasks usually consist of resolving incidents to do with data loads and transformations, access management (granting access to databases/tables etc) and general performance monitoring. I also specialise in query optimisation and performance, so there's quite a lot of improving other peoples SQL in my day to day role.

 

Hope this helps, and feel free to ask more

[Sir Asvald]

44 minutes ago, mrchow19910319 said:

For example do you open Sequel Pro and edit in there? Or you download some database file from github and edit it in atom then re-upload it back??

I am familiar (sort of) with web development, I know if I want to design a website, I need to 

 

1. create HTML CSS JS file write shit in it

2. open browser and see what it looks like

3. upload the shit to some server or something like that.

 

 

 

OFF TOPIC

 

Since you mentioned. Web Development is much harder than you think. First and foremost, you just don't create a page and write some JS. You need to know what the layout is going to look like. How much width, length, etc you're going to need, how many pages you're going to know. Since you asked about it, You're going to need a database to store all the information. For example, you want want to create a booking form. You're going to need JS, as you mentioned, and a database to store all the information

 

ON TOPIC;

I've worked with MySQL, phpmyadmin and other ones which I can't remember. People think it's complicated, it is at first. I'd say creating tables and inserting all the information is more tedious and time consuming. Takes a long time but it's fine. I've got a few customers who keep breaking their WordPress installation so at times I need to rebuild their database. I make sure that all my clients websites and databases are all in tact and backed up.