DBA work -- both high and low profile
One thing about being a DBA, or at least the flavor of DBA that I am, is that there are many opportunities to impress my customers and boss by automating things or setting up cool reports. But much of what I do is behind the scenes and not too glamorous. Stuff that no one really knows about but that keeps the databases healthy and enterprise applications running.
I have recently been working on moving servers and service accounts to a new domain. Talk about tedious! Because I work so closely with HR and Accounting, I took responsibility for getting all of their servers and service accounts, not just SQLServer, migrated. Luckily, both departments have their own dedicated and talented IS staff so I was able to enlist their help to get each department's servers migrated. I managed to come up with scripts for some of the tasks, but it still is a lot of work and has to be done during non-production hours.
A couple of things that broke when changing the SQL Server 2000 start up accounts was SQL Mail and the SQL Server performance counters.
To fix SQL Mail, I basically had to just set up SQL Mail again by creating a new Outlook profile using the new account. I then chose the new profile for SQL Mail and for SQL Server Agent. Clicking the test button for each indicated everything was fine and doing my own test confirmed it. I didn't have to restart the SQL Server as I have had to in the past for some other SQL Mail problems. I try to avoid using SQL Mail if at all possible but still need it for at least one application.
I didn't think about the problem with the performance counters until a couple of days later when I needed to look at them. When I saw they were gone, I remembered that this had happened to me before and that it was easy to get them back. Unfortunately, the fix requires rebooting the server or at least restarting SQL Server. So, I had to wait until our short maintenance window Saturday morning to fix the counters. To fix this run the following from a command window
unlodctr mssqlserver
lodctr <path to sql server>\bin\sqlctr.ini
Then restart SQL Server. I actually rebooted the server since that is what I found when searching to find the answer to the problem. Today, I found a reference that said just to restart SQL Server http://www.extremeexperts.com/SQL/FAQ/EnablingPerCounters.aspx .
I'm really glad that the web has so many resources for DBAs like me who have to solve so many different problems. I don't know everything about SQL Server, but luckily, I usually can find the answer I'm looking for