One of the things we were debating recently here at SQLServerCentral is the value of spending money to help out DBAs as administrators. Is it easier, harder, or even worth proving value for a tool, say a monitoring or performance tool, for a development tool?
One of my thoughts is that it's hard to do this because people don't often know they have issues. We see so many people buy hardware that's overkill for the SQL Server instance that 4 people connect to and while it might be horribly inefficiently written, 4 people can't kill the server. Or not enough to matter. Or, hopefully, not that often.
So is this a problem? I'd argue that it is and it isn't. Most applications never scale to the heights we wish they would. They're lightly used, and if they trundle along on their hardware, inefficiently written, but not really being loaded.
So is that an issue?
As long as you have lots of hardware, perhaps not. However as we try to better match hardware to load, especially with virtualization, this might become more of a problem.
Too often we find people acting as a DBA, even having that title, without the experience to really understand if they have a problem. They don't have monitoring, they don't proactively look for problems. They are in many cases just hoping that everything functions as it should, and that they won't encounter any issues that upset the balance of their daily workload.
Is this a problem?
I would argue that it depends. From anyone but a DBA that might not seem like an argument, but I'm sure you readers will understand. On one hand we want to ensure that people are well trained, that they can do a good job, and so the lack of understanding is a problem. On the other hand, if things are working, it isn't. Why fix something that isn't obviously broken?
One of the reasons I started this site was to help people. It became a business, but we still look to educate, inspire, and assist those people struggling to make SQL Server run well.
Steve Jones
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