Database development office politics... in video form



  • I really could not express the futility of this enough without using lip-synched dogs :-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNUZLnpvK1o



  • I would love to see this done to some of the posts in this forum. I think the added visualization and audio would make some threads even funnier.



  • @dohpaz42 said:

    I would love to see this done to some of the posts in this forum. I think the added visualization and audio would make some threads funny or sane or remotely understandable.

    FTFY



  •  +1 originality

     

    Also... snoofle? is that you?



  • Fantastic.  The worst hours of my life have been spent in meetings discussing RDB design and shit.  I'd rather get food poisoning than go through that again.



  • I shared the video with a coworker over IM.

     

    Coworker: wait, did you make this?
    Me: no
    Coworker: because it's almost verbatim what happened with [client]
    Me: oh?
    Coworker: yes
    Coworker: they ran out of space time 3 times
    Coworker: we could not help them immediately because ....
    Coworker: their internal policy forbade us having access!
    Coworker: we had to send emails with detailed instructions on what to do
    Coworker: their indian contractors would not follow them until a corporate approval told them to
    Coworker: in the mean time, X and Y were scheduling our dev resources for "critical issue calls"
    Coworker: in the call, i personally told their dba what to do and what menus to press to do it
    Coworker: after each step, Y gave him approval to proceed
    Me: who are X and Y? [client]'s Indian contractors?
    Coworker: X: vp of [client]'s information services,  Y:  executive vp of information services
    Coworker: 7 layers down, some indian dudes in bangalore remote desktop'ed into [client]'s servers
    Coworker: to get a server restarted, THEY also had to submit a ticket to the server room supervisor
    Coworker: the server room supervisor did not report to X or Y, but to corporate IT
    Coworker: hahahahahaha
    Me: niiiiiice
    Coworker: ask [other coworker] for more details, he loves [client]
    Coworker: we learned a valuable lesson though, we promised we would investigate ways to recover gracefully from this kind of problem
    Coworker: i suggested we should also gracefully handle processor faults and power outages

     

    (Why yes, this coworker does have a rather snarky sense of humor. Why do you ask?)



  • I feel your pain. I'm not a dba (fortunately!), but I've been doing db maintenance, sometimes assisted by an external dba, while the people that got paid to do so, happily ignored their duties and indeed let the disk fill up steadily (and not running statistics, performance monitoring, well, the lot). And since I work at the department that actually has some contact with the customers, all problems become our problems, no matter whose reponsibility it was. That of course also includes unrealistic promises by account managers, but that's another story...



  • @TGV said:

    I feel your pain. I'm not a dba (fortunately!), but I've been doing db maintenance, sometimes assisted by an external dba, while the people that got paid to do so, happily ignored their duties and indeed let the disk fill up steadily (and not running statistics, performance monitoring, well, the lot). And since I work at the department that actually has some contact with the customers, all problems become our problems, no matter whose reponsibility it was. That of course also includes unrealistic promises by account managers, but that's another story...
     

    Hey! What's that supposed to mean. Why "fortunately"?

     

     



  • @SQLDave said:

    @TGV said:
    I feel your pain. I'm not a dba (fortunately!), <snip />
    Hey! What's that supposed to mean. Why "fortunately"?

    Possibly because most of us find much of the work that DBAs need to do frightfully tedious.  Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that there are people willing to do the work, and many of them are competent.  Also, most of the DBAs that I generally interact with spend the vast majority of their time dealing with developers.  I have nothing against developers, I am one myself (at least, one of my hats), but we can be annoying - especially if we think we know the other person's work domain, but don't.  Alas, most of the developers I've worked with who interact with our DBAs fall in that category, to a greater or lesser extent.

    It could also be that TGV feels being a dba is synonymous with working with Oracle.  That having been said, I have yet to work with any database that comes with an interface I find really comfortable.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I could easily do better.  I'm merely saying that I wouldn't want to work with that 40 hours per week.  It's kinda like me not wanting to be a network engineer because of disliking IOS, except in that case, I'm aware that the Linux command-line (preferably with zsh, but bash wouldn't be too unpleasant) already provides a more pleasant alternative.



  • @tgape said:

    @SQLDave said:
    @TGV said:
    I feel your pain. I'm not a dba (fortunately!), <snip />
    Hey! What's that supposed to mean. Why "fortunately"?

    Possibly because most of us find much of the work that DBAs need to do frightfully tedious. ...It could also be that TGV feels being a dba is synonymous with working with Oracle.

    Well said. DBA work is not for me. It is tedious, and you not only have to fight with developers, but also with IT maintenance and support, customers, and project leaders (which probably is what makes dbas think they're the center of the universe and gets them that passive-aggressive attitude). We've got a customer that has the hardware in-house, it is administrated from our company at a third location by people that don't really know what it means to maintain a db (oracle, indeed), with an SLA that conveniently omits data retention issues, and a disk that's full. And both other parties refuse to add an extra disk. Did I mention the backups of the whole system, including db, go to the same disk?

    And indeed, Oracle is a world on its own. The enterprise manager alone could easily constitute the fifth circle of hell for developers.



  • @TGV said:

    DBA work is not for me. It is tedious, and you not only have to fight with developers, but also with IT maintenance and support, customers, and project leaders

    Oh bog!  I neglected to think about IT maintenance and support, because I'm not on that end of things - I don't play even part-time DBA, and never have (well, not professionally).  I neglected to think about customers and project managers, because in all the interactions I've had with customers and project managers who wanted to talk to our DBAs, they had very obvious confusions about the boundary between what the DBA did and what I did.  So rather than say who the DBA was, I just said I'd talk with the DBA, and it was solely my action.

    I guess I'm getting a better appreciation for why my DBAs like me.  :)



  • Thanks for enjoying the video everyone, it means a lot to me, it's like cold comfort - the best and only kind of comfort I can get :-D


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