I was looking at the list of topics I have talked about in my “What Counts for a DBA” posts over the years, and a topic really stood out as a topic I have not touched. To be fair, it is really the most essential aspect. One aspect that, if not truly understood and taken … Read more
It’s been a while since I last wrote a new blog, and it has been a very long time since I last wrote a fresh new “What Counts For a DBA” entry. I celebrate this with a pun title. The last technical blog I wrote was scheduled to be published on March 19, 2021 and … Read more
Everyone needs deadlines. Even the beavers. They loaf around all summer, but when they are faced with the winter deadline, they work like fury. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d stagnate. ― Walt Disney I hate deadlines. Really. I truly hate them. The problem is: they are usually unrealistic, often not much more than a wild … Read more
“Aim High!” “You could be president some day!” “You’re just as smart as that Einstein kid down the street” … …And other crazy things parents tell their kids. Of course, very few kids grow up to be President, or a groundbreaking scientist. Most of us are merely adequate. Adequate parents, and adequate at our jobs, … Read more
I was whistling contentedly as I hung up the Christmas Decorations. It may have been ‘Jingle Bells’, or it could have been ‘Santa didn’t buy me a bow-wow’: Christmas songs are creepily similar. As I hung up the lights on the Christmas tree, I was struck by the thought ‘Decorations are not decorations at all, … Read more
Manners, learned as soon as possible in life, give us social skills without us having to figure them out. While our parents and teachers made us feel as if they were laws, manners vary from laws in one important way. Laws are hard and fast rules that exist naturally (like gravity or relativity), or from … Read more
Whose fault is it if a database is hacked and its contents appear on a hacker’s site? Sure, the hacker is the criminal, but could you, the DBA, have prevented the crime happening to your servers? In the end, the odium that follows a data breach descends on the company who is storing the data, … Read more
Every project I am on, there seems to be a common argument. The project manager is pushing to get done faster, and we software producers are pushing back for more “quality” time. Shouldn’t managers have more empathy for what we development-DBA types suffer in pursuit of high-quality data? Every cry of “how much longer is … Read more
It’s Friday afternoon, and the lead DBA, a very talented guy, is getting ready to head out for two well-earned weeks of vacation, with his family, when this error message pops up in his inbox: Msg 211, Level 23, State 51, Line 1. Possible schema corruption. Run DBCC CHECKCATALOG. His heart sinks. It’s ten…no eight…minutes … Read more
“You see, Watson,” he explained in the early hours of the morning as we sat over a cup of tea in Baker Street, “it was perfectly obvious from the first that the explanation for this query’s sudden poor performance was elementary”. “But how could you guess what the cause was?” “Firstly, we see that the … Read more
Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with … Read more
Of all the valuable attributes of a DBA covered so far in this series, ranging from passion to humility to practicality, perhaps one of the most important attributes may turn out to be the most seemingly-nebulous: foresight. According to Free Dictionary foresight is the “perception of the significance and nature of events before they have … Read more
