Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Responsibilities of the System Administrator

The administrator is responsible for the integrity and availability of the data. This is a simple concept, but it is a huge responsibility. Some large corporations place a valuation on their data as high as $1 million per 100MB. The investment in dollars is not the only issue; many companies that lose mission-critical data simply never recover.

The actual job description for a system administrator varies widely. In small shops, the administrator might lay out the physical design, install SQL Server, implement the logical design, tune the installation, and then manage ongoing tasks such as backups. Larger sites might have tasks broken out into separate job functions. Managing users and backing up data ...