

The Certified DBA - araneae
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Certified-DBA.aspx

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michaelcampbell
I'm certainly an idiot when it comes to corporate politics, so someone help me
out here. Would it have been stupid politically to just show actual evidence
that what this admin was asked to do was actually quite a bit slower and less
optimal than what he actually did? Perhaps up the DBA's chain?

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tom_b
This is actually a key insight - you need to actually do a little bit of
experimenting when you get into software performance.

Politically, you can run into weird "ownership" issues (eg, the DBA team
handles system performance) and fighting the chain is soul-deadening. One of
the reasons I considered actually getting one of the myriad DBA certifications
is to add the heft of being able to say I had it to the PHBs when this type of
thing comes up.

Thankfully, I held off and I think for the most part these certifications
(although valuable when paired with demonstrable applied skills in real
projects) have fallen out of favor lately. Certs are a particularly strange
form of resume fodder - a few years ago they were pretty key in making it past
the HR gauntlet. I imagine that for some techs (I'm looking at you, Oracle)
they are still a defacto requirement.

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j_baker
"fighting the chain is soul-deadening"

...not to mention a career-limiting move. PHBs tend to not like it when people
complain to them about their bad hiring decisions.

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NyxWulf
This is the type of article that really gets my adrenaline pumping. I find it
so frustrating to read about these types of things, although the frustration
for me is in the fact that people take one person and vastly over generalize
to an entire class of people.

Yes, there are "Certified DBA's" who are morons. Guess what, there are System
Admins that are morons, Programmers that are morons, Pilots that are morons,
Doctors that are morons, etc, etc.

If his main takeaway from that situation was that "Certified DBA's" are morons
and that system tuning is little more than hand waving and hot air, he failed
to learn the real lesson.

The real lesson imo, is that in every field you have people that are morons,
and you don't know if the person you are dealing with is a moron based on
their credentials. You only know if someone is smart and gets things done
through actual experience.

For what it's worth, performance recommendations of this sort are the easiest
to expose because of the availability of quantitative performance measures.

~~~
j_baker
I don't think this was meant to bash DBAs. Only "Certified DBAs" who think
they're smart enough they don't have to listen to reason.

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illumin8
Great story. I build a lot of Oracle clusters and have to deal with "certified
DBAs" that have "opinions" based on experience back when 9GB hard drives were
a large size.

Luckily, there are great tools out there like ORION (Oracle I/O Numbers Tool)
that let me simulate an Oracle workload which give me real quantitative data
that I can use to prove a particular configuration is non-optimal.

I've had to prove and disprove configurations before, and personally I think
that if you're building any storage for database, you better benchmark it. Too
many sysadmins just take the default settings on their storage and might only
get 10% of the potential out of it.

I've seen a lot of systems that were setup in wtf ways. For example, having 4
HBAs in a system and all data is flowing down a single path, since the
sysadmin never bothered to install multipath drivers or set path preference.
This happens _all_ the time.

Check out my blog for some of my latest database storage benchmarking:
<http://sanarchitect.blogspot.com>

