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30-day lab plan · 🧮 Database Administrator (DBA)

Become job-ready as adatabase administrator in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

PostgreSQL and MySQL on two VMs, pgAdmin/DBeaver, sample datasets (pagila, employees), and our cron explainer. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

SQL & design

  1. Day 1Install PostgreSQL + MySQL; load sample DBs
  2. Day 2Write 20 queries/day: joins, aggregates, window functions
  3. Day 3Design a schema for an invoicing app; normalise to 3NF
  4. Day 4Indexes: add/remove and compare EXPLAIN ANALYZE
  5. Day 5Transactions and isolation levels: reproduce a dirty/phantom read
  6. Day 6Constraints, triggers, views
  7. Day 7Review: document the schema and query performance findings
Week 2

Operations

  1. Day 8Backups: pg_dump/pg_basebackup + WAL archiving; mysqldump + binlogs
  2. Day 9Point-in-time recovery drill (drop a table, recover to just before)
  3. Day 10Users/roles/least privilege; TLS connections
  4. Day 11Monitoring with pg_stat_statements + Zabbix/Prometheus exporter
  5. Day 12Vacuum/bloat lab; pg_repack
  6. Day 13Scheduled maintenance with cron (use our explainer) and logging
  7. Day 14Review: write the DBA runbook v1
Week 3

HA & performance

  1. Day 15Streaming replication primary → standby; promote standby
  2. Day 16Patroni + etcd automatic failover (3 VMs)
  3. Day 17PgBouncer pooling; load test with pgbench
  4. Day 18MySQL InnoDB cluster or replica; failover
  5. Day 19Partition a large table; measure query gains
  6. Day 20Slow query triage exercise with a deliberately bad query
  7. Day 21Review: HA design doc with RPO/RTO
Week 4

Migration & portfolio

  1. Day 22ora2pg/pgloader: migrate a sample MySQL schema to PostgreSQL
  2. Day 23pgvector: load embeddings and run similarity search
  3. Day 24Security audit against CIS benchmark; fix findings
  4. Day 25Cost model: RDS vs self-managed on Proxmox for 500 GB
  5. Day 26Write a migration plan with dual-run and rollback
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish scripts/runbooks on GitHub; update resume
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions