Brent Ozar has started a retrospective. The first post covers “What would you say you do here?”:
When the database goes down, the business stops. If you’re selling things online, and your web site goes down, that’s an emergency. Even if it’s not down – if it just slows down – that can be an emergency too. DBAs help prevent that problem.
When someone accidentally deletes data, the business can stop. Unfortunately, in all too many companies, there are too many folks with access to that data – and those folks are often untrained. They’re just human, and they make mistakes. Database administrators help recover from that problem.
The second post looks at the lack of progress in many areas:
When I started working with databases, we had to:
– Provision the right CPUs and memory
– Provision the right storage throughput and size
– Install the database
– Configure the database
– Protect it – which sounds easy, but that also includes designing the right high availability and disaster recovery solution
– Design the right tables, and put indexes on them based on how we wanted to query the data
– Write fast, accurate queries to load & retrieve data
– Troubleshoot the whole thing when it went wrongToday, decades later…yeah.
We’re still doing all of that stuff. It’s just that we’re cave-people using rocks for tools instead of banging on things by hand.
I’ve got some thoughts on this but they won’t fit on this stamp. I’ll have to put them together some other day.