Re: OT- raw meat in these days of devops
Date: Thu, 20 May 2021 17:23:17 -0400
Message-ID: <a10346ba-6c66-894e-91cb-5deac3a27f56_at_gmail.com>
Once upon a time Bill Gates's SQL Server was sold with a pitch
that the database doesn't need an expensive DBA to run which
supposedly made it much cheaper than Oracle. As a consequence
Larry Ellison started talking about the diminished role of the
DBA, all the while both products were quickly becoming more and
more complex. Today, nobody in the right mind would run a
significant SQL Server installation without a DBA. The same goes
for Oracle RDBMS. However. Oracle Corp. is still hostile toward
the DBA personnel and is publishing less and less internal
information. And example are private redo threads, which are not
explained anywhere in the Oracle documentation. The only place
with the satisfactory explanations in Jonathan's "DBA Core" book.
With Oracle 6, 7 and 8, redo allocation latches and redo copy
latches, as well as the whole redo process were well covered in
both the documentation and the support white papers. We were even
modifying spin count for the copy latches. No such internal
information is published any longer.
There were several parallel developments which have poisoned the
atmosphere quite a bit:
- Java became an industry standard and a myriad of "database
neutral" MVC frameworks like Hibernate and Spring sprang into
existence. Those have created the impression that the underlying
database is not important. And those have generated some ghastly
SQL that is very hard to fix.
- The whole idea of database neutral applications with all the
business rules being handled in the Java code instead of the
database gave rise to buggy monsters usually utilizing
application servers like WebLogic, WebSphere or JBoss to enforce
the business logic. That leads to redundant code with the
business logic being enforced differently for the same tables.
- Educational institutions in their rush to produce more and
more desperately needed Java programmers have neglected teaching
the rules of good design. I've seen the databases without
foreign keys, triggers and with tables with hundreds of columns,
frequently duplicated. I was once told to no longer ask
interviewees about the 3rd normal form and the primary keys.
Apparently, Java programmers need not such obscure database
stuff.
- People are not taught the fundamentals of the operating systems that run the databases. I have heard all kinds of ideas from the programmers. One of the funnier was the suggestion to increase level of parallelism to 16 in order to speed up the query. The VM running the database had only 4 virtual processors.
- Agile methodology accentuates the speed of development. Frequently, there is not enough time to asses the performance and management is always inclined to skip the performance assessment in order to make the artificial deadlines. The resulting mess is left to the "reactive DBA".
Long story short, rambling about "reactive role" make no sense
and further contribute to the emergence of PHB like characters.
Finally, about grandchildren: my grandson is adorable, he looks
just like me when I was a kid. I am sure that many people on this
list find me adorable.
This thread is chock full of the divergent definitions of DBA that Oracle VLDB and MOSES tried to wrap their hands around a while ago - before Codd's twelve rules reached their silver anniversary. Even before Codd's model, if the pre-design application functional goal and architecture team didn't have a DBA to make sure the (IMS? Codasyl? HiSAM? database structure) made sense, it was considered an amateur prototype. Now THAT DBA was probably someone who had been a developer and/or sysprog for half a decade, ran a team, was senior in the organization, but was offered the chance to bring institutional knowledge to the technical efforts without having to manage people. Sigh. I should dredge up the definitions and job descriptions, but I'd rather spend time with my grandchildren. Anyway, most of the problems with being a DBA stem from a mismatch between what a particular DBA thinks the current position duties are and what the DBA managers think are the duties. So talk to each other.
-- Mladen Gogala Database Consultant Tel: (347) 321-1217 https://dbwhisperer.wordpress.com-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu May 20 2021 - 23:23:17 CEST