Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Next Generation

    Star Trek: The Next Generation
    Will the next generation of IT be as successful as this next generation?

    There have been more and more Women in Technology panels and discussions at SQL Saturdays and other events in the past few years. I think these are a great way to talk about interesting more women in technological careers and helping women deal with the issues if they already work in Information Technology. There are definitely issues here, and it’s good to discuss them, not to the exclusion of other groups, but just to focus on this one area. I think we potentially have issues with other groups in technology as well, and would welcome them to form their own group for discussing the challenges they face.

    However I also think we need more people working in technology of all sizes, shapes, colors, genders, and ages. We hear about a shortage of qualified people in many areas, including databases, and we need to attract more people to this field if they have an interest. But how do we know if they have an interest? Perhaps a more important question comes from this MS Education Blogger: “How do they know they’re not interested?”

    It seems that a lot of the focus from the WIT panels I’ve listened to is ensuring that more women get the chance to experience technology and decide for themselves if it’s an interesting career. It’s about creating an atmosphere where everyone has the chance to experience technology, mathematics, engineering, and other hard sciences without feeling that these careers are not appropriate for them.

    Whether you like your career in technology or not, I’d hope that you’d encourage others to give it a try and experiment. They might find that it’s something they enjoy, and would like to follow as a career. Save the complaints, the downsides to this field for another day, after they’ve had a chance to determine if they even like working with computers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Stump the Wizard

    wizard
    Stump the wizard is a fun game for our car trips.


    Today we have an editorial from Aug 3, 2007. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.

    It goes like this:

    Kendall: “I need a coach…Kyle!”

    They confer in the back seat of the car and in a minute we hear “I’m thinking of a word that starts with a “P”

    Mom: “It is an animal”

    Kyle: “No, it’s not a ‘pig’.”

    Mom: “It is an animal”

    Kyle: “No, it’s not a ‘pelican’.”

    Mom: “It is an animal”

    Kyle: “No, it’s not a ‘parrot’.”

    Delaney: “Is it the word in the military alphabet that starts with ‘P’?”

    Kyle: “No, it’s not ‘Parade’.”

    Delaney: “Is it the word in the military alphabet that starts with ‘P’?”

    Kyle: “Sorry Kendall, I don’t know that one.”

    Delaney (laughing): “It’s ‘Papa’!”

    Kyle: “The next letter is ‘a’.”

    Dad: “Is it something used to carry water?

    Kyle: “No, it’s no a ‘pail’.”

    Mom: “Is it something you do when you’re very scared?

    Kyle: “No, it’s no a ‘panic’.”

    In case you haven’t guessed, it’s a car game we play called “Stump the Wizard”. You try to guess the word by asking questions of the Wizard. If you can ask a question the wizard cannot answer, then you get the next letter. All subsequent answers to your questions must use the letters you have. If the wizard can come up with 3 answers to your question, then he or she is off the hook and the question is discarded. We’ve played this quite often and it’s fun, just hard enough to make it challenging, but it’s not too often that the word can’t be eventually guessed.

    It’s fun and you might want to try it sometime. So for a Friday poll, let’s get off technology.

    What’s a fun game to play with others that passes the time?

    With family, friends, even something to do while that next Service Pack is being applied. 20 Questions used to be our favorite before this one.

    A funny story: we played Stump the Wizard a bunch of times while driving around Cancun in June and of the dozen or so games we played, we were stumped twice. Both times by our 6 year old daughter, Kendall! She uses whoever is sitting next to her as her “coach.” She comes up with the word and they respond to the questions.

    The words? Palace and Vulture.

  • The Cloud

    cloud
    Has cloud computing changed at all in the last few years?

    This editorial was originally published on Sept 11, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is on holiday.

    I was interested to hear about Microsoft providing some services and storage in the “Cloud.” I remember hearing about Amazon making disk space and computing services available to users.

    So is this the next big thing for us? Microsoft’s push of cloud services including software, storage, and more?

    I’m not sure if it is, and I’m not completely sure what to make of it. Amazon’s storage service might make some sense as a backup of your photos since it’s not likely that you’d lose your hard drive and Amazon would lose theirs at the same time, but it could happen.

    The worrisome thing is that while Amazon or Microsoft might tout their service as reliable, fault tolerant, etc., but the reality is that your 2GB or 4GB of stuff isn’t valuable to them. They’re not going to go through too many hoops to get that data back.

    And if it’s gone, it’s gone.

    Things always fail. Just think about the recent WGA problems, a service that you’d think that Microsoft would make sure is always working.

    I think that the cloud computing makes some sense for a Windows Live type of service. If I could have the latest version of Word or Excel in the cloud, with local (automatic, hint, hint) backups made to my local device, that’s pretty cool. Installing new versions of Office are a pain, especially when I almost never use Access, Powerpoint, or anything really beyond Word or Excel.

    It would probably install some crazy ActiveX type DLLs and make my system just as flaky as it is now. But since I reboot about once a month when I get patches (or lose power ), maybe that isn’t so bad.

    Steve Jones

  • Canceling Customers

    Sprint Fail
    This is not the image you want your customers to think about.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Sept 4, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is on holiday.

    Last week’s guest editorial talked a bit about the customer fiasco at Sprint. I certainly don’t think armed services personnel should be penalized and really should be able to get out of almost any contract without penalties if they are transferred. We certainly owe the individuals serving in any of our countries a debt of gratitude and this is the least we can do.

    However this seems like a data mining report gone bad to me. I can just imagine some pinheaded MBA reading a BI report that shows customer services costs are $1M and we can cut that down to $200,000 by getting rid of the 1000 customers that cost the most money. You figure that you have 50M customers, losing 1000 or so isn’t a big deal. You probably lose 10,000 a month anyway.

    So you dig in and see that by manipulating the report variables in your Cognos or Proclarity report, you can find customers that call support more than 25 times a month and customers that roam too much and set a monthly report to auto generate a letter to these people canceling their service. You get this brilliant idea approved and …

    You’re in the Wall Street Journal for incredibly insensitive actions. Anyone want that job?

    I think this would not have been a big deal for Sprint if they would have dug in deeply to the circumstances of everyone they were thinking of canceling. Check customer service logs, listen to some calls, see if they are truly problems that cost you money or if you have broken processes. From the reports I’ve seen on various sites and message boards, there were definitely some problems with Sprint’s customer service.

    If you decide to go into consulting, you will have problem customers. It’s just the law of averages that out of every 10 clients, you’ll have 1 or 2 that eat up most of your time, are a pain, etc. Dropping them isn’t always an option, but neither should you feel that you have to put up with problem customers. Be fair, give them honest effort and service for your charges, and do a professional job.

    But don’t put up with unfair treatment. The customer isn’t always right and sometimes does deserve to be fired.

    Steve Jones