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I've been thinking pretty heavily about what I want to do as far as a career is concerned. I knew that I wanted to work with computers, but I hadn't figured out in what capacity. I recently narrowed it down to Network Administrator or Database Administrator. I've since decided that I want to get into Database Administration. What I'm wanting to know from you guys is what is the best way to get into database administration? I currently have a CIS degree and am A+ certified. Should I seek MCDBA certification also, or should that wait until after I get into the career? What are some things I can do to prepare myself to be a database administrator? I've been thinking that I will purchase Windows 2000 or 2003 and SQL Server to familiarize myself with SQL and working within a database. What else would you recommend?

Thank you!

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Good choice narrowing to a DBA path. already has a useful starting point, and ’s reminder that you can learn on lab-friendly engines and non-Windows servers is worth building on: hands-on practice beats theory alone.

Core areas to learn and be able to demonstrate

  • SQL and query tuning: read execution plans, experiment with different index choices and compare times.
  • Data modeling and schema design: normalization, appropriate denormalization, and how design affects performance.
  • Reliability: full/incremental backups, point-in-time recovery, integrity checks and a tested restore process.
  • Concurrency and transactions: isolation levels, locking behavior and how to diagnose blocking.
  • Maintenance and monitoring: automated maintenance, log management, growth settings, and using monitoring data to spot trends before they become incidents.
  • Environment skills: familiarity with both major server OS families, storage considerations, and basic scripting for automation.

Practical lab work to prioritize

  • Build a repeatable lab (virtual machines or containers). Practice installing, breaking, and fully recovering databases from backups.
  • Create realistic workloads from public sample datasets and measure the impact of schema/index changes.
  • Automate common tasks (backups, integrity checks, alerting) with scripts so those scripts can be shown on a resume.
  • Simulate failures: disk full, service crash, network partition, and verify your recovery steps.

Career and certification approach

  • Focus first on demonstrable experience: a solid lab, a documented recovery you performed, and measurable tuning wins matter more than a paper cert.
  • Use early roles that touch databases (support, devops, DBA support) to accumulate real incidents and make those items concrete on your CV.
  • Once you have practical experience, vendor/role-based certifications amplify credibility and open doors.

Next actions: set up a lab, learn execution plans, practice full restores, automate a maintenance task, and document everything for interviews.

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Member Avatar for kingt36

Thanks for the tip! What OS is recommended? I'm guessing Windows Server 2003. Is that accurate? Are companies still using Windows 2000?

Member Avatar for pty

Thanks for the tip! What OS is recommended? I'm guessing Windows Server 2003. Is that accurate? Are companies still using Windows 2000?

Either is fine. All the databases (mainly PostgreSQL) I'm responsible for here run on Debian.

All the databases I listed (possibly with the exception of Sybase but I'm unsure) will run fine on both Windows and *nix systems.

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