Hello and welcome to the December 2010 edition of T-SQL Tuesday. This month’s host is Steve Jones (blog|twitter) of SQLServerCentral, who poses the question: “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done”.
Oh…oh, well then. Stop me if you’ve heard these…
Did you hear the one about the BA that kept calling tables “functions”, and columns “rows”, no matter how many times I explained the difference? (This is a very common theme, that of calling an object or deliverable by a very misleadingly wrong name.)
How about the dev team that removed all relational constraints in the production database because they were “causing issues”. (You know, the kind of issues that force one to insert and remove data properly.)
How about the extended discussions with the architect over the extremely slow production queries (based on 8-level-deep nested views), who haughtily insisted that “We weren’t coding for performance!”
Or the time that we couldn’t use SQL Mail for alerts and notifications because management just “didn’t trust it.”
Ooh, ooh, that other time, when I had to provide numbers to management in order to prove that indexes improve query performance?
And then my all time favorite: The team (dev, DB developers and DBAs) who played hot potato with the server responsibilities, each one claiming that it was the other’s to maintain / support / keep up and running /etc. After being told, simultaneously, that it was (A) under the umbrella of the DBA department, (B) not to be touched by the DBA team until it was “out of beta”, (C) that it was actually a “working beta”, and therefore in the care of the DB developers…I began to worry seriously about disaster recovery for this, our company’s production database that was our primary source of income... So I chased the DR rabbit all the way around the circle, with both coworkers and mangement (and against advice). “What,” I said, “happens if the building burns down? If the server room floods? If the place gets walloped by a tornado? If some moron spills a coke in the server room??” Finally – oh so finally – I was utterly and completely stumped by the team lead and the lead DB dev, who told me……wait, are you ready for it? Are you sure?
“Well, we’ve never had a disaster before…“
Bah-dee-bah-dee-bah-dee uh, that’s all folks!
(It’s really not. But you get the idea.)
Happy days,
Jen McCown
