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?
Best Answer
If you are in this situation the first thing you should do is make sure you know where the documentation for the database product is and start reading it. Initially the focus should be on backup and recovery because if you don't get that right the other responsibilities of a DBA don't matter.
If the database is Oracle for example, find the appropriate documentation site for the release you are on from http://tahiti.oracle.com/. A good place to start would be the Conepts guide and then perhaps the 2 Day DBA guide followed by the Administrator's Guide.