datachick

Wikis are wonderful. In a high-trust, teamwork-happy, professional environment. Throw a fixed-price, "value" contracting firm in the mix and you end up spending hours a day rolling back changes that were made just to cut scope and quality. Fortunately, I never work on projects like that.

Hope to chat with you there.

Good. Then you can see that I'm actually about 6" taller than sqlrockstar​

I may have to put that on a t-shirt.

I wrote this 3 years ago. And it still applies. Data is Power

I think it's fine for outsiders to try to guess what went wrong...if they do that in a way that shows that they are clearly just guessing. IT is the only technical profession that does not share, openly, when and why failures happen as part of their profession. Failure analysis in engineering, medicine, architecture is…

I’d say hire all kinds. 

Ah...good resource. And pretty much follows my advice. That makes me feel clued in. Thanks.

Happy to hear it helps.

Great examples. I sometimes call this discussion with upper management doing the math for them. I was having a discussion with a product manager. He wanted a feature, that while technically feasible, was going to lead to massive growth of the database. He had the authority to make the decision, but I was pretty sure the…

Happy you liked it.

Do you have a short list of business priorities and a matching mnemonic for remember them? Sort of like first aid's Breathing, Bleeding, Broken Bones? I had one client who swore the only priority he had was "Don't blow up houses". 

To me this is the significant difference in analytis in figuring out what is happening now versus other times. Has the problem been getting worse? Is it "blippy" and erratic? Do get that information I need to see metrics over time. And on specific dates.

Oh, yeah. storage questions are completely missing in my list.

The most common issues I find with vendor DBs: * No constraints, sometimes not even PKs. This is all "handled in the application". Except its not. * No FKs. Vendors say this is due to the fact that they are cross platform and it's too difficult for their devs to understand the FK constraint syntax for the whole 3 RDBMSs…

The people who bring the right cost, benefit and risk statement are going to get to that pot of cash before the people who bring no data at all. Having data to back up that business case really helps. The people I wrote about brought no data. What data would you bring to get more resources?

I so feel for you there, matt.matheusI've certainly been in those environments. It isn't always the whole company; often it's just one really terrible manager. I still encourage people to bring data to the battle. At least when the auditors or takeover accountants show up, your recommendations will still look great on…

Will take a look at how that fits here. I could blog here or on my own blog about that. Certainly I've done many presentations on that.

Mostly it's due to the fact we don't have licensing. And we likely never will. I think we should, but at the architect and design level, not the builder level. That's how it works with engineering and architecture.

Great list, thanks. I'm in real trouble with your social media ones..

Well, that was the point of his post. And all of mine. Anti-patterns in collaboration. I'm hoping everyone will click through the links to read the quotes in context. I'm still going to use MTTI in my work. Love the snark.

I agree. But I also have some anti-security actions that I believe deserve negative feedback.

Thanks. There are a few names out there for this: Categorize, Classify, Catalog. I’m waiting to see what the data community ends up settling on.

Great list of questions there.

I guess it's both. I'm looking for specific questions, but also encouraging people to ask questions.

YEAH!

I like the way you think.

Ha. I just logged back in to add that because I forgot that section!.

Then you might be an Accidental DBA!

I don't hear about data centre breaches as often as I hear about plain old unsecured data. For the ones I've visited, the physical security is intense.