WFH

DBAs are good

byrmol — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 01:22:00 GMT

Financial, health, demographic, taxation, production, defence etc...There is some serious data out there all under the control of the men and women we call DBAs.

Several years ago I remember being given a CD containing the entire electoral roll. Within 10 minutes the data was inside SQL Server and my fellow DBA had a query showing all the girls aged 18-25 who lived in his neighbourhood.

With the "information is power" catchcry, the potential for fun and profit are not far away and yet you hear very few cases of fraud/malicious damage against a DBA.

Is it because they are extremely ethical? Probably not...
Is it because they know how to bypass log and audit functionality? Maybe..
Is it because they signed a confidential agreement? Probably..

Either way the DBA controls the most valuable part of a modern day business. The advent of OSS, IMO, has given rise to more value being placed on data and schema and hence more responsibility for the DBA. Several application vendors go so far as give cryptic names to tables in the hope of security through obscurity. I remember seeing a UDF for GPS coordinates that had a copyright tag on it. Granted it could be from a standard template but don't flatter yourself. Imagine the state of the industry if IBM had IP'd the RM model (or SQL), where Codd was working at the time.

Select * from table --pay IBM $0.01
You don't want to know how much a CREATE TABLE cost...

So it seems we are nearing a point where every bit of software is potentially free and simple postcode data costs $1000.00

Viva la DBA!

DBAs are evil

byrmol — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 02:54:00 GMT

A long time ago just down the road, no matter who asked you your name, you always gave the same reply.

" I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod."

DBAs, who where good at the time, where stoked. FirstName, LastName and Clan.. Nice natural composite key.

As usual, we screwed it up, breed like rabbits and ended up doing Satan's work. The answer now depend on who's asking...
To the telephone company I am SUCKER093546
To the Government I am SLAVE8273

And who is responsible for this? DBAs. They don't see people as normal people do, they are just nodes on a B-tree and the B-Tree damn well better be as compact as possible.

And so it came for my time in the devil's recruitment drive. Should the identifier be an INT > 0 with the Identity property set or a GUID?

Identity	GUID	Weighting
Smallest	Largest	10
Not Updateable	Updateable	10
Fastest	Slowest	10
Locally unique	Globally Unique	50
Proprietary	Open Implementation	10
Hardest maintenance	Easiest maintenance	10

The highest weighting is given to the scope of the uniqueness for this application. It is really the ability of a client to create a valid key regardless of connectivity state. This is core functionality so a no-brainer really.

If I can just get the person to have the GUID imbedded in his forehead in Code 39 symbology, I'll get good seats for Armageddon. :-)

Office, equipment & first scope

byrmol — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 23:25:00 GMT

I am hoping this will be the first of many, but time constraints or other circumstances may alter the hope.

A desk a mate of mine built, is the main workstation which is not far from the kitchen. The 2-way satellite modems are connected to it and its a 2 point whatever Celeron with 512MB RAM. I went on a bit of shopping spree and bought a laser printer, 512MB RAM, my first optical mouse and a DVD burner. The DVD unit was because the MSDN Universal discs are in that format.

<WHINGE>Where's my MSDN? Where's my MSDN? Where's my MSDN?</WHINGE>

Side Note: If you yell into the Internet does anyone listen or care?

The burner part of it was because they are so damn cheap and I'm a consumer. All those goodies got stuffed into the machine and its main purpose is for running the Visual Studio IDE.

In the other block, the house is two separate concrete slabs connected by a small covered walkway, the other 2 "servers" live. "Web" box is a 1.5G Athlon with 256MB RAM and it will host the Web Services and Web Site. The "DB" box is a Pentium III 450Mhz with 128 MB RAM. When the other block was being built, I installed the CAT5 to every room.

Better Half: "Why is there CAT5 running to the shower, toilet and vanity?"

Me: "Umm.. I've been thinking of running a side business?"

Better Half: "Where are the divorce papers?"

No wall jacks where put in but the cable is in place. <EVIL LAUGH/>

I deliberately chose the crappiest box to host the DB because if you know me, I will try and get the DB to the highest form possible and with as many business rules jammed into the DDL as possible. If it performs badly I will work backwards to "fix" it, but my pick is that SQL Server and MSDE will handle it just fine..

The initial scope was a one page document that contained a mixture of process, functionality and infrastructure items. It seems to indicate a DB schema of 150 - 250+ entities not including auditing or application specific needs. That was about expected. Personally I have found that any more than that requires another modeller. Its not that you cannot do more, rather a different mind/perspective is invaluable.

Some times a single phrase in a scope document can extrapolate to a lot of work and it is those, as well as major functionality areas, that I will be concentrating on with the client.

I've seen a few different methodologies and I hope to use bits from all of them. I like the XP philosophy of heavy client interaction and the rigid borg like "must have full detailed specs or kiss my ass" method.

In a nutshell I'd like it to be tight iterations of discovery, understanding and design based around functionality.

No place like home...

byrmol — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 03:03:00 GMT

It's 2:45AM and I have been on the road for nearly 11 hours. The car is packed to and on the roof and the dogs are sleeping with one eye open. The little sign finally appears and I brake as the turn-off approaches. 10 miles of dirt road leads us up the mountain and welcomes us a jolt. The other eye opens and the scramble for poll position on the front passenger seat takes place. In their eyes, they both have the best spot.

I quickly accelerate to reach that certain speed where the suspension and the ruts in the road form a sought of "eye of the storm" affect. Too fast or slow and it shakes like a Las Vegas motel bed on a wedding night.

A wallaby enters the edge of the high beam then quickly vanishes. I ease off a bit. The dark line ahead slowly turns into a log? Goanna! Breaks hard. Both dogs hit there heads on the dash and as the speed drops I start to turn slightly away from the reptile. It doesn't move. They rarely do. This one is about 6 feet long from head to tail and looks pretty proud of himself as I pass him. Awesome animals and worth the lump on the dogs head, some lost rubber and a ride on the 'Vegas express. The rest of the way is fairly uneventful, another wallaby and kangaroo stare mesmerised but stay still on the edge of the road. Finally we reach the plateau where the road is a bit better and the first crops appear. Stone fruit on the left and right are covered with netting to protect against the flying threats. Macadamia, mangoes and grazing land the rest of the way home.

I've worked in every state in Australia in the last 12 years except Tasmania (I haven't been there) and South Australia. But my excuse for SA is that it has the best surf beach in the country and <CENSORED>..... The last gig was 18 months in the nation's capital and while it was a fantastic job, I was still 1000km from home.

The dogs leapt out, I won't see them for a while, and I try and wake up muscles that went to sleep half a day ago.

The dream has always been to work from home. Later on when the macadamia trees are bigger, that might be possible. But agriculture is probably the riskiest game in town, but IT and "work from home" just go together. :-)

The people I had worked with and the friends I have made over the years, provided an opportunity that gives me at least 6 months work from home. Its the biggest solo project I have tackled to date and will be a challenge of all my skills.

A SmartClient application built from the ground up including the data model and its implementation. Its like a cacophony of techno babble.....NET 1.1 framework (C#), SQL Server and MSDE as the DBMS, Windows Forms and ASP.NET implementations, Web Services blah blah blah... Notice a theme here? Microsoft.

If you know me, I am not a MS fan boy, but most of my development life has been in MS products. So I finally coughed up and registered as a partner then joined the EMPOWER program to get the MSDN Universal cheaply. If all goes well, we might have a chance at shrink wrapping it...

I have been well and truly "Borged", but at the moment I am not resisting for I AM HOME.