Re: Microsoft destroys TPC-C records!

This thread has reminded me of something that I learned a long time ago -- Production DBAs in large 24X7 environments are a very different breed of people.

They are generally very cautious and precise. They have to be because production environments are very unforgiving. For example, in our system if I misspell a replication definition by even one letter during maintenance activity on Friday night, come Monday morning the system is down. If I allow a bad cleanup job to go through, we may lose data. Since our system tracks all child abuse and neglect cases for the entire state, there are legal implications, massive public opinion implications, and we may even lose millions of dollars of support from the federal government.

It even shows up in language. They don't use words like should, ought, might, probably, hope, maybe, and other linguistic constructs that forgo precision and certainty nearly as much as people who work within development and test environments (I notice that our programmers use these terms a lot as do our non-production dba's).

They are also often among the most respected technical people in the organization, and wield considerably more influence on the project than even they themselves sometimes realize. And, most importantly to this thread, they influence buying decisions about database systems since there is usually not a single person in the organization qualified to challenge their input on the matter.

Now, these people want something that is tried and true, but still open enough to allow for flexibility in solving problems. They want to be able to script their maintenance, schedule it to run automatically, and get the result sent to their text pager. In short they want their presence and their presence to be invisible and their database to be simply taken for granted. This usually means UNIX, and that's the achille's heel of Microsoft.

They also tend to discount specious claims of performance and reliability of which Microsoft has made many.

The bottom line is this:
It's usually the production dba that eventually influences platform decisions the most. The production dba is probably a UNIX head. And, that means no Microsoft.

Personally I long for a Microsoft dominated universe. I want everyone (except me that is) to get gut-hooked on gui interfaces and tools that require no knowledge of syntax or structure, and forget everything that they know about the internals of information systems and how to automate maintenance. I think it will eventually drive up my billing rate, and thin out competition at the very high end.

Jason Webster Received on Thu Mar 23 2000 - 13:47:14 CST