Thank you, Lynn, for your previous post. I have reinforced in my first blog posting on SSC about certification as a good method to keep up with technology.  Instead of commenting directly to your post, I’m elaborating here below.

Absolutely, as you’ve said, share(!), it's the best way to create a productive environment, and, in turn, the reason why SSC has always been a great site for progressive DBAs or Database Developers in general. However, in this crisis, people are not always so nice at work, especially if you are a minority.  What you describe in the second paragraph sounds like the company is just running for the money, very common considering the current climate – hard to fight against executives who are, rightly so, really just trying to keep their companies alive. 

Resembling many contributors to SSC, best practices are a sought after by the never stop studying types or those who espouse Kaizen, to name a few Ideologies, and this is nothing novel.  Over a thousand years back, Charlemagne became very successful at uniting Western Europe by not only the sword, but due to his constant desire to study and improve how his domain was governed. He never stopped studying and notice where that got him, hence why should we. There’s an audience of a million DBAs here now, let’s continue to study and push each other along and see what happens – who knows, like Sir Isaac Newton said, all he did was stand on the shoulders of giants (such a humble professional and genius at the same time). There are plenty of good minds contributing to SSC, collectively we’re already doing a great job for the community. I’m still very happy just to take part in this space.

Despite the above optimism, territorialism in some organisations means that your peers will possibly not be returning you the favour or you might not feel appreciated.  In fact, the info/power you give them may be used to against you later if they are militant separatists. If you act too smart, then the resentment sets in and the vexatious behaviour follows, so best to lay low right(?), which is rather hard when you are over six feet and blond. 

I don't want this to be a windge fest, just a reminder that sometimes, with certain types of people whose goal is only to get themselves ahead (not long term thinkers, like you and I), you should be sure to cover yourself by informing the stakeholders of the exact actions you are taking, and get written approval, before a knife falls on your head to cut costs.  You can be as altruistic as you want, I and trust me I’m not leaving this attitude anytime soon, but the lowest common denominators will try and trip you up to justify their salaries.

Regarding what works in production - I’ve had the argument with territorial DBAs before who wanted to keep a process running for 16 hours because he knew that it works. Even if I could make it run in forty five minutes in test and disaster recovery, they would still block me from fixing things (even be told that they would quit before you are allowed to optimise processes), because production is theirs’ and not yours; so funny, thought we left that behind in the kids’ play yard honestly – we’ve only come so far...

I can tell you are a perfectionist (in a good way) T-SQL coder, and thanks for tweaking my backupset query!  I shall do my best to return the favour when the time comes, or maybe something in my previous blog postings can help you indirectly. Look forward to your upcoming offerings!