Organization

The DBA as a Power Broker

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Managing databases is an intricate endeavor. At a certain point in your career you’ve started writing scripts to accomplish various tasks. Writing the scripts turns out to be the easy part. The difficulty surrounds properly documenting them all, which is why most of this intelligence remains within the confines of the creator limiting its value. By publishing your productivity enhancements and [...]

Agile Provisioning

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

This is the first in a series of posts that will present how production database systems (and dependent systems) can be changed over time without breaking clients that access the database, and how to communicate these changes to the interested parties. While database professionals can easily see how change is required in the schema [...]

Storing the Juicy Details

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I have been working recently on what is, for me, a large-scale project. I realize that this pales in comparison to the Manhattan Project and sending people to the moon, (US Progress of the past, Right Now) but still - for me this has been quite an enhancing experience. Our software product requires that we [...]

People Clusters: Shared Everything

Monday, July 16th, 2007

The debate over shared nothing clusters vs. shared everything clusters will rage on for quite some time, but there should be no debate over the importance of people sharing the information in their heads. DBA’s manage voluminous amounts of information regarding the databases and infrastructures we are tasked with maintaining. It stands to reason that [...]

Improve Your Chance of Success

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

There is always going to be the possibility that something you set out to do will not be completed successfully. This is especially true with all the complexities of managing databases. Mitigate these risks by ensuring that all parties involved define “success” the same way; otherwise, even if you think you are succeeding, [...]