Featured Article(s)
Creating your SharePoint 2010 custom Ribbon components
Ribbon is a new way of incorporating an entry point for your custom functionality in SharePoint 2010. Find out what`s involved in creating your custom controls in ribbon and how you can take the most out of it.
Secrets of SQL Server Webcast Series from Idera
Idera is putting together a series of webcasts called the "Secrets of SQL Server." This series focuses on a SQL Server administrative topic each month, so you can get information on all sorts of different things that you can apply to your work with SQL Server. The next topic is "Getting Started with SQL Server Replication" and it’s happening on January 13th at 4p EST. Click here to get registered and save your spot today.
Explaining The DBA Role… and the Superbowl?
With last thoughts about the conversation, Ralph wrote in to say "Sadly, I have been battling this for quite a while now and I am at the point of deciding that there may be no hope of conveying the message to the management of most businesses. A colleague I was talking to today put it very concisely, "Most business managers do not understand the nature of soft assets or soft costs." Since most upper management comes from the business side of the house, it is going to be difficult to get them to buy into the idea that DBA’s are not interchangeable and one, sole DBA cannot maintain the entirety of their servers and databases if the number of servers or databases is counted with more than one digit. (I am still trying to get management to understand that all developers are not the same sized "cogs" with the same number of "teeth" and, therefore, totally and simply interchangeable!) This becomes especially true if the CIO is actually from the business side and is not conversant with the technology of databases (or development).
I have, on rare occasions (while I was a Road Warrior) seen companies whose management realized that, in this day and age, the database is the life-blood of their business and acted accordingly. In those instances, they most commonly also realized that, just as an accountant may not make a good warehouse manager or a warehouse manager may not make a good customer service manager, there are different skills needed in the area of databases in order to get the most benefit from them. Of course, it is interesting, as I look back on those organizations, that they also realized that developers are not interchangeable cogs.
I would say that, at best, I have had mixed success in getting management to understand he issues involved and the need for a Database Team with specialty players.
With another Super Bowl on the horizon, I wonder what would happen if a football team decided that players were totally interchangeable either among the positions or between Defense and Offense. Do you suppose that we would be watching that team on TV during the next Super Bowl? Maybe that is the analogy to approach management with . . . especially when management has tickets to the Super Bowl. 😉"
…and here I thought he was going to bring up my lagging fantasy Football skills…
Featured Script
Local Partition Demo – Life of the Party
This script is a companion to my sswug.org article "Retrofitting Table Level Delete/Archive Strategies – Life of the Party"… (read more)