The most important DBA skill?

If you were interviewing for a SQL Server DBA position and they asked you, "What is the most important skill that a DBA should have?", what would you say?

Technical skill? Working under pressure? Ability to work as part of a team? Ability to follow the standard procedures and rules that apply to your position?

All of these are good answers, but I think that one of the most important, if not the most important, is people skills.

Before you disagree with me (if you do) let me explain.

I have known lots of people with excellent technical skills. They were smarter than me by a long shot, but they could not communicate with people to save their lives. They were either socially hindered, arrogant, or just plain rude when it came to talking to our customers. This lead to our customers requesting that DBA X not be assigned to their project. This lead to a very bad situation inside the DBA team and the DBA in question finally left, much to the relief of all.

The same applies to all of the answers given above (although if you are a good team player your people skills should be OK as well). I would rather hire someone with a little less experience and technical skill who is a great communicator and people person than an expert who can not relate to people or is rude or arrogant. If you have the right base skills, you can always learn the technical stuff. Learning the people stuff is not so easy.

What do you think? Am I right or do you disagree? Let me know. Thanks!

Jim

Generate password in SQL

Here is a nice little stored procedure to let you generate a random strong password. I have used this to help automate the automatic changing of the SA password for all production SQL servers every 30 days.

The process looks up the SA password for the given server from a secure table and then connects to the server. Then this store procedure is used to generate a new password which is then applied to the SA account and saved in the secure location.

This process replaced the manual process of logging into 30 different production servers every month and doing it all by hand. Worked very well.

Here is the code for the stored procedure. As always code is provided as is. Use with care.

CREATE PROCEDURE GenPassWord
@len INT = 8
AS

-- Creates a complex password of the passed in lenght.
-- If no lenght passed in, defaults to 8 characters

DECLARE @password varchar(25)
DECLARE @type tinyintDECLARE @bitmap char(6)

SET @password=''

WHILE @len > 0
BEGIN

SET @type = ROUND(1 + (RAND() * (3)),0)
IF @type = 1 --Appending a random lower case alphabet to @password
SET @password = @password + CHAR(ROUND(97 + (RAND() * (25)),0))
ELSE
IF @type = 2 --Appending a random upper case alphabet to @password
SET @password = @password + CHAR(ROUND(65 + (RAND() * (25)),0))
ELSE
IF @type = 3 --Appending a random number between 0 and 9 to @password
SET @password = @password + CHAR(ROUND(48 + (RAND() * (9)),0))
ELSE
IF @type = 4 --Appending a random special character to @password
SET @password = @password + CHAR(ROUND(33 + (RAND() * (13)),0))

SET @len = @len - 1

END

--Here's the result
SELECT @password