What learning resources are there for part-time DBAs?

Luckily, this isn't a current issue for me, as in my current workplace we're pretty well supplied with DBA knowledge in the team. However, in small development teams, it's not uncommon in my experience for one of the team to be nominated as the de-facto DBA. For a small team there's rarely enough work for a full-time DBA (and/or there are DBAs, but the production DBAs don't want to get involved with supporting the dev/test environments), so a tester or programmer will be expected to pick up that role, and I've seen people getting suddenly landed with "hey, Joe's leaving, so you're now our new DBA. No, we have no training budget, you'll have to teach yourself. Have fun!"

What resources can you recommend for someone who finds themselves suddenly in the position of having to get up to speed with a development DBA role? What basic tasks should they aim to tackle first, just to keep things ticking over?

If your going to be "The DBA" (part or full time) you should learn as much as you can before the former DBA leaves. I think people in this situation should talk to anyone who knows about the database (the data flow, the design choices, common task, etc.), it is very hard to try to learn the db even if documentation exists.

Also, the person should have something like a dba profile, If you don't like it you would be doing something that brings no excitement and you will have no satisfaction from your work.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#445, answer score: 5