dan.tan (1/3/2014)
I'm a developer who fell into the DBA role because we had no DBA. So for years I was 80% developer, 20% DBA, before I switched into full-time DBA. I think it's resulted in me being a more pragmatic DBA because I still remember what it's like to ship a release against a tight deadline. And honestly, I rather miss coding.In the end, while I am responsible for the health of the servers and the integrity of the data, I believe my ultimate responsibility is to deliver solutions that enable the business to achieve their goals. And that sometimes means speed of project delivery over completely optimized database operations. I'd rather enable than obstruct.
In my limited experience, because I'm willing to help, developers who are weaker with T-SQL will seek me out and ask me to assist with complex queries. Those developers end up learning a lot about T-SQL and need less help in the future.
Have I let some queries go that make me cringe? Sure. But I also know that I've written some cringe-worthy queries in the past for code that had to be delivered quickly, and miraculously they didn't result in significant impact on database efficiency. So I have a lot of sympathy for developers who are under the gun.
Well said, I agree as a developer. Some times I look at it as a DBA as the Monday morning quarterback. The DBA can look back over the work and maybe see what you did wrong or could have done better. But in the 'middle of the game' you do what you have to do to get the job done. We usually don't have the luxury of having enough time to go back through the code to 'fix' some of the bad code. And as others have stated when you develop the code against a smaller 'test' version of the data, or you have to make up your own data, the code you wrote at that time worked great, but when you get more data coming through it may be less efficient. No one can always write the most efficient code.
I also agree that it works better when the DBA is on the same team as the developers. And each of us, I include myself in this, need to check their ego's at the door.
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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.