Re: venting my spleen

"Tom Hoffmann" <tom.hoffmann_at_worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:pan.2002.06.30.19.11.18.805672.1851_at_worldnet.att.net...
> While I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, my experience as an SA (and
> part-time DBA) over the past 12 years is that developers are notorious
> for wanting to blame all their problems on either the OS or the DBMS ...
> particularly when performance is involved ... when they did not engage
> the expertise of either individuals when they were designing their
> programs. I keep telling them that performance can not be added after the
> fact ... it has to be designed in. I have spent countless hours over the
> years just proving to developers that the problem is with their code ...
> not the OS or DBMS.

My guess is that this is generally (or at least often) true. It is also true that the only truly effective way to get an app that performs well is scalable and secure is to design performance scalability and security in from the start. Having said all that it can be hard when you have spent three weeks trying to get something just to do what the spec asks for, and you finally got the damn thing out (or in extreme cases even to compile) to be told 'you need to rewrite that'. Especially if the person telling you this hasn't (for whatever reason) been involved with the development and doesn't know the hell you've been through.

> While I realize this is only my experience and can not be genrealized to
> the entire developer population, it is particularly vexing to me that
> developers in general expect the SAs and DBAs to drop everything to look
> into why their programs don't work as they expect, but they are unwilling
to
> cooperate to help solve the problem. The old dump-and-run is usually the
> order of the day ... "Call me when you've fixed my problem".

Maybe its my nature, but this is what I like about the job. The day to day is this tablespace getting full, what does the alert.log say etc is knida wearing. The ' why does this run so slow now I've added more than 3 records' is what gets my attention.

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
*****************************************
Please include version and platform
and SQL where applicable
It makes life easier and increases the
likelihood of a good answer

******************************************