sturner (8/9/2012)
jbnv (8/9/2012)
Is there any benefit of bringing such a vision to a company that can't seem to grasp it?Sadly, No. A lot of existing organizations have business architectures that were 'designed' up by a VB programmer back when the company had a fraction of the transactional activity or amount or scope of data. Back then the quality of the design was unimportant, and it would have worked as well if the data was stored in flat files.
As the company grew to a point where they realized they needed a full time DBA (probably after being scared because of a database crash or getting hacked) the architecture becomes sort-of locked in. The powers that be usually adopt the attitude that "it served us well for the past 10 years.." so it will continue to do so, they just want a DB professional to make a few 'index tweaks' and do backups and improve security. The scalability and concurrency (or lack thereof) of the existing architecture is is never questioned because there is no conceptual understanding of relational database engines or the data designs that allow them to perform to their maximum potential.
This is what my old manager called "solution jumping" but I'm not sure if that makes sense. I'll try to explain...
If I'm the DBA, you don't get to tell me that you need index tweaks, you tell me you need better performance or some other thing that you understand. If I decide that index tweaks are the way to accomplish that, then that's what you'll get... but if I decide the database needs more work than that, you have two options: accept that my expertise is legitimate and go with what I say, or learn enough about databases to fully understand what I'm saying and then help with the decision about what to do. Most people are not open to the second option, but reluctant to accept that the person they hired is actually capable of the job they were hired for. This is insulting to me, and I've never liked it.
However, you can't just come in as the new guy and start bossing people around. You have to be tactful, and in some companies "DB done right" is a foreign concept and a cultural change, so you have to wait for it to happen, and play along, leading them slowly to the inevitable realization that you know what you're doing.
The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.
Awesome! That's totally going on the wall 😀