December 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Database Management to Kill For
I was watching an old episode of Law and Order the other night on Tivo and a big VP with a fortune 500 company was killed. Early in their investigation they found out that the database management software he had approved and purchased was obsolete by the time he got it. For a brief while it was the basis of their theory... he was murdered over this purchase because database management software is very expensive. Frankly, that's the only thing they got right. Fortune 500 companies don't care any more about how good the DBA's tools are any more than Microsoft does (just kidding Liz).
It's not just fortune 500 companies though. I've never really seen any company care all that much about their DBA tools. In fact, the tools quite often get traded out with the DBAs. Some prefer the native tools, some prefer Embarcadero or Quest. All the same, most companies don't take much stock in it. That's not the way it should be though. The amount of time your DBAs spend on the every day management part of their jobs is less time they have to actually be productive.
It's an incredible balancing act that the tools have to manage. They have to be extremely useful and save time while at the same time not making the DBA too dumb. It does seem though that we're never happy. We want something to make our jobs easier and obscure us from the inner workings of our most mundane tasks, yet we get upset when we can't find a DBA who knows anything about those inner workings.
Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent here so I'll stop. The point is I just thought that episode was funny and wanted to share it. I've caught their writers in mistakes before, and this was just one of the more subtle.
Posted by Sean McCown on December 13, 2006 09:54 AM
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Interesting tangent there. I stopped watching Law & Order several years ago, but I'm sure the database software angle would've made me chuckle. I have noticed boxes of CA software (I think it was BrightStor) in the background on ER, though. Not sure why there would be storage management software in the emergency room of a busy hospital... but ya gotta love CA's product placement folks.
Posted by: Craig Mullins at December 14, 2006 01:23 PM"The amount of time your DBAs spend on the every day management part of their jobs is less time they have to actually be productive."
Has anyone actually stopped and thought that maybe the "every day management part" of the dba job *IS* the dba job? And that attempting to reduce that achieves, essentially, nothing? Other than vague statements about TCO and other deranged such?
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