Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are an incredibly valuable addition to the DBA’s troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions. Why, then, aren’t all DBAs using them? Why do even those that do use them speak wistfully about “good old sysprocesses”? It’s because DMVs are so complex that they are horribly difficult to use unaided.

In the course of our work here, we have become increasingly concerned with making our software tools, and our publications, easy to use and intuitive. With Simple-Talk, we do a post-mortem on every newsletter and try to work out what we could have done better. Our readers are a diverse crowd, with many different requirements in terms of subject matter and technical level. We’ve learned from long experience, the sort of straight-forward technical content that they find most useful. Nobody, we are certain, wants any unnecessary complexity. When they meet it, they are polite; they don’t whistle catcalls or break windows, they simply go elsewhere.

DMVs are extraordinarily useful, but the SQL needed to retrieve even fairly basic information is so intricate that we are all obliged to collect them like mystic spells. And DMVs are not the only part of SQL Server that is so complicated that one gasps, and breaks into nervous laughter. The WMI Alerts, introduced in SQL Server 2005, are another good example of this. Service Broker is extraordinarily valuable but, sadly, ruined by its complexity.

I have a theory that it is a blow to our individual pride to admit that something is too complicated for us to understand. Nevertheless, usability is important. Or does Microsoft inhabit a parallel universe where the complexity of its Server products simply doesn’t matter?

It would be fascinating to plot the chain of decisions that led to Microsoft to release DMVs in their current state. Does the Server team live in a rarified atmosphere where they don’t talk to ordinary users, only MVPs and an inner coterie who aren’t eager to criticize the hand that nurtures them? How else is it possible that they leant back in their chairs, surveying a DMV query that looked like someone spilt alphabet soup on the page, with seven joins and five cross applies, and thought “Job well done. The users will just loooove it”.

Am I being a wimp? Am I in a minority in liking simplicity and clarity in IT? As always, we’d  all love to hear what you think. And the best contribution to the debate, added as a comment to this blog, will receive a $50 Amazon voucher.

Cheers,

Tony.