Voice of the DBA

Tag: Humor

  • What Not To Say

    Don't yell at the boss

    This article on 8 things your boss doesn’t want to hear made me smile. There are a few phrases listed that I would definitely recommend not using if you want to succeed in your current place of employment.

    Having managed a few DBAs in my career, I thought of a few more that I thought might fit the data professionals out there as “things not to say” to your boss:

    I’m not sure if more memory will help: You could substitute CPU or disk drives for memory in this one, but it’s your job to know. If you don’t, learn how to tell what your bottlenecks are and make appropriate recommendations.

    That additional memory didn’t help: The only thing worse than not being able to make a good recommendation is making one that doesn’t improve performance after your boss has approved the purchase. Now you look bad, and you’ve made your boss look bad.

    Company X has offered me $yyyyy. Will you match it? You can get away with this once at a job, or maybe once a decade. If you want to go to your boss with this one, be ready to quit if you don’t get it, and be ready to shine if you receive the raise. No one wants to be put in a corner, and I would be likely to let you move on if you came to me, unless I felt you deserved it. Even then, the second time you ask, I’m showing you the door.

    I downloaded this software off the Internet and it crashed the server: You can’t trust stuff you download, no matter what the Open Source crowd says. Test, test, test. Preferably on a test machine.

    It works on my machine: I have always wanted to answer this with a “Who gives a <insert four letter expletive here>?” My actual responses haven’t been that far away if it’s an important project and you give me this excuse.

    Feel free to add your own “things not to say” to the comments below.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72279/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Enjoying the New Year

    The last 5 or 6 years, on this day, my family has gotten together with friends for an evening of games and fun at Dave and Busters before returning home for some movies or Rock Band until the wee hours of the morning. Tonight I expect to do the same, with some relatives in from out of town, making this one of our biggest parties ever.

    This is the last day of 2010, and most of us are starting to look forward to the new year. Next week will have us back to our jobs, and back to the proverbial “grind” as we are working with SQL Server. Hopefully this isn’t a busy weekend for you, and the last chance for a bit of a holiday before the new year.

    As such, I decided to make this a fun Friday poll, and ask for recommendations from you:

    What movies from 2010 would you recommend for the technologist this weekend?

    I haven’t seen a lot of movies in 2010, between a busy family life and travel for work, but I would like to relax and enjoy a couple this weekend. I just watched Sherlock Holmes over the Christmas break for the first time and enjoyed it. I think that one of the more enjoyable technological films of 2010 for me was Inception, which I saw a couple times while my wife paid to see it 5 times in the theater.

    As we close out this year, hopefully with a quiet day for most of you, share with us a suggestion for how we might enjoy ourselves away from work this weekend.

    Steve Jones

  • The Institute for Backup Trauma

    This is an editorial reprinted from April 27, 2005.

    It’s viral marketing, but it’s not bad. Livevault produced a short video starring John Cleese as the director for this institute that seeks to counsel those that have had problems with tape backups. “Such an unreliable medium”, this one is straight out there. An advertisement for Livevault, a little silly, satirical, but not that bad.

    It’s an interesting concept and one that I’ve debated with various colleagues over the years. Tape v disk. Which one is better for securing and ensuring the integrity of your data, which one is better for business continuity, which one works for your budget.

    When I started in this business, it was a no brainer. Disk was way more expensive than tape and there wasn’t even a choice. Nowhere I worked could afford to backup their data to disk. On top of that, the technology for managing disk backups wasn’t great. I remember working for a small company and we couldn’t afford a VCS system. At least, I couldn’t pry money out of my boss for one, despite the fact that the business lived and died based on the code that was written. So we setup 5 folders on the network: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you guessed it, Friday. Under each one, the other developer and I each had our own folder and a batch job that would copy data off our desktops to the appropriate folder on the appropriate day. We erased everything older than 5 days, though we still had tapes if we needed them.

    Today, with disk being nearly as cheap and much, much faster than tape, and the need to go back more than one version in a business environment being fairly rare, it makes some sense to use disk. Microsoft released their own software, that helps with data recovery on disk, so there must be either some growth or a very high profit margin in this area 🙂

    Personally, I think that the idea is a good one, but like many new technologies that change the way a user works, this one will take some time to get used to. I’m all for users being able to recover their own data without calling an admin, especially when the admin is me, but I’m sure that there will be lots of calls on how to find the files, which version, I forgot to save it, but my machine crashed and I want to go back 3 versions, annoyed calls when the last version on disk rolls off, etc.

    But I wouldn’t give up my tape. At J.D. Edwards, we backed up the databases to disk, then to tape that night, with two copies of the tapes being made. One went offsite and one was in a rotation on site. The triple protection served me well and we never had issues getting data off disk or one of the two tapes.

    Of course, that was expensive, so it’d not an option I’ve had often. Still, one disk and one tape worked out well and these days having disk be so cheap, a second copy on disk is something I’d shoot for.

    Steve Jones

  • Happy Halloween 2010

    I know Halloween was yesterday, but since it’s a holiday, and I continue to make plenty of mistakes, I’m putting out the blooper reel today.

    As I get ready for my trip to SQL Server Connections this week, I’m entering a busy period of travel and could use a minor break. Especially after spending yesterday around a horde of 9 year old girls trick or treating with amazing amount of energy, lots of sqeals and more OMG!’s than I think I’ve every heard in one day.

    I hope everyone is having as good a Monday as you can and look for some editorial thoughts about SQL Server Connections later in the week.

    Steve Jones