Re: How to control developers writting better SQL

peasland_at_edcmail.cr.usgs.gov and a whole-buncha-others wrote: <a whole buncha stuff>

A good thread.

I am by trade, a Unix sysadmin performance specialist.

Inter-team communication is very important - on, but also off the job. And as much fun as surprise blanket parties are :-) I've found it more satisfying to buy rounds of beer for developers and DBA's after coordinated milestones are reached.

I remember my first meeting with a particular development manager - we butted heads rather hard. But then after staggering back up from the floor, we realized that we both wanted to go in the same direction - and proceeded to open lines of communication...

From the sysadmin side, I made sure that the DBA's and developer leads were involved in system management decisions - such as putting together the system hardware and software upgrade proposals for the next year.

We met regularly to put together, among other things, what amounted to an ongoing performance improvent plan. Each meeting had a prearranged agenda - new proposals, previous objectives and the results.

Different developers and admins would show up at different meetings, excited over various proposals for modifying this or tweeking that.

Source code control systems that had been a joke (have you ever seen the cartoon where at a funeral, the grieving widow is asked "did he ever mention anything about source code?") became very functional. What began on the Unix boxes led to some serious cross-platform cfg mgt proposals.

An important outcome of configuration management is workable standards (not to mention reproducable versions of your programs).

Towards the end of my involvement we completed the conversion of the large data warehouse system to new disk arrays. And since we shared those arrays, that also led to communication with other sysadmin/dba/developer teams (across HP, IBM and NT platforms). We put together online documents showing how data was distributed across LUN's, channels etc. that were referenced and updated on a regular basis.

At then end, 15-90% performance improvements were seen in many/most applications. Received on Thu Oct 26 2000 - 23:43:00 CDT