Re: consolidation of multiple rows

Michael Austin wrote:
> Jerry Stuckle wrote:

>> DA Morgan wrote:
>>> Jerry Stuckle wrote:
>>>> DA Morgan wrote:
>>>>> Jerry Stuckle wrote:
>>>>>> DA Morgan wrote:
>>>>>>>>> If you know the names Date and Codd you should know who you are
>>>>>>>>> addressing: Joe Celko.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Not a name I am familiar with.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Says much about your attitude toward our profession.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Enlighten yourself:
>>>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Celko
>>>>>>> http://www.dbmsmag.com/artin301.html#A000009
>>>>>>> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Wikipedia%22+and+%22Joe+Celko%22&btnG=Google+Search 
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Not necessarily.  There are a lot of top notch programmers and 
>>>>>> DBA's who have never heard of Joe Celko.
>>>>>
>>>>> Well right now I can only name one. <g>
>>>>>
>>>>> Of course you are correct. There are top notch programmers that
>>>>> don't know who Chris Date is. There are top notch programmers
>>>>> that don't know who Dennis Ritchie and Ray Boyce are either no
>>>>> doubt.
>>>>>
>>>>> Though I suspect you could put the names of those "top notch"
>>>>> programmers on a 3x5 card.
>>>>
>>>> Quite incorrect.  Right off the top of my head I can probably name a 
>>>> dozen I know personally who haven't heard of him.  He's well known 
>>>> in some circles, but definitely not all.
>>>
>>> The operative phrase here is "top notch." If they ever took even a basic
>>> class on normalization they could not have missed the name Boyce. If
>>> they learned more in C than "Hello World" they'd know who Dennis is.
>>
>> Not necessarily.  A lot of great DBA's know normalization but don't 
>> know  Boyce.  And these are DBA's who manage databases in the hundreds 
>> of terabyte range, running sometimes tens of thousands of operations a 
>> second.  They learned normalization techniques and maybe even heard of 
>> Boyce and Codd.  But they have no idea who they were.
>>
>> And while they were famous 20 years ago, a lot of people who have 
>> learned C in the last 10 years or more have never heard of either 
>> Kernighan or Ritchie.
>>

I'm not talking thousands of transactions a minute. I'm talking TENS OF THOUSANDS ever SECOND. A much higher order of magnitude than you have.   To do this successfully, you need to be a great DBA - and these are. They have to be to be in the business and companies (mostly Fortune 500) they are in. And they have to be able to design databases well - and they need to know when to break the normalization rules for performance reasons.

But these people don't ask questions. The know the answers already. And, if they don't, no one does.

To be a fair DBA you don't need to know everything. But to be a great DBA, you've GOT to understand the design, coding and administration of databases. Someone may know one part really well. But that doesn't make him a great DBA.

> The other really sad part is that they were hired because they were
> "certified".

>

None of these are "certified", AFAIK. They were hired for their knowledge, not because of a piece of paper. But then they were doing it long before certifications were around.

> Michael Austin -
> and I have heard of all of these guys... including Joe and even have
> (and read) some of their books. :) :)
> "While commoditization may improve a company on Wall Street, over the
> last few years, it has stagnated the innovation in that technology.
> Nothing but the color of the box, price and customer loyalty
> differentiate many of the current offerings in computing technologies.
> --MA"
>

-- 
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex_at_attglobal.net
==================