Re: No future for DB2 - slightly off-topic, discusses what people are being taught at uni

"Neil Truby" <neil.truby_at_ardenta.com> wrote in message news:3l3kneF10n87tU1_at_individual.net...
> Speaking from my experience in the UK I find an even wider trend: in the
> four years by consultancy has been going we've recruited several graduate
> trainees. In 2001 and 2002 you could be pretty sure that most applicants
> from university would have a pretty decent grounding in UNIX and/or Linux,
> these being the platforms favoured by academia. We'd also find that most
> would have done at least one hands-on course or practical assignment with
> SQL Server or Oracle.
>
> We didn't recruit in 2003 or 2004 and this year has been a real
eye-opener.
> Perhaps less than one in five applicants has had *any* practical
experience
> of a non-Windows OS - if they know about UNIX/Linux at all it's because
> they're done a theoeritical course lasting a most a couple of hours.
Also,
> the level of database theory has dropped too: asked to name a commercial
> database system they name Access, which is the "database" that the
majority
> of them have hands-on experience of. A few had also used SQL (as they
call
> SQL Server, using the phrases interchangably). One or two were able to
name
> a non-MS database product, which was Oracle. None had heard of DB2,
Ingres,
> Informix etc.
>
> When we probed into the characteristics of a database, and why it might be
> more effective for retrieving small sets of data from much larger sets,
most
> struggled, and although one or two had a grasp of the principle of indexes
> (or "keys"), I'm can only remember one correctly identifying, even at a
high
> level, how an index might help in this regard.
>
> All this change in just 4 years or less. I've no reason to believe that
the
> academic qualities of applicants is lower than in previous years: indeed
we
> met some brilliant young people. But I infer from this exercise that UK
> academia at least has quickly gone from a bastion of UNIX to not teaching
> anything non-MS.

The project I am working on has been developed by UK folks and we are customizing it for this Canadian customer. I too got a feeling that those guys are experts only in SQL Server.
Their concept of a RDBMS seems to be weak. For e.g. in SQL Server one can create a Foreign Key without creating an index. In fact index creation on the FKY columns is a separate process. Same in Oracle and DB2. What the UK folks never realized is that almost all the time a FKY column is joined with PKY column for Query (otherwise why would it be a separate table). So creating index on the FKY column should be automatic when creating the FKY constraint. When I joined the project, one of the first fire I had to fight in the testing phase was locking. SQL server use to do table scan when it can't find matching index and that pretty soon escalated into locking and deadlock problem.
ISOLATION LEVEL - well most of them don't even know what it is, let alone it is.

I am beginning to wonder whether being a full time DBA is a dying profession left for old fogies like me. Received on Sun Jul 31 2005 - 06:15:28 CDT