As most DBAs, stuff keeps us busy. Stuff has kept me busy. Some family and some other things relating to the IOUG and putting together great topics for upcoming webcasts and training for the user community and then of course there is the actual tasks of a day to day DBA.
It is actually Feburary already, and might be too late to wish everyone a happy new year filled with fun database opportunities and discussions.
Yes, we (I) get excited over debates about how to handle referential integrity, how much should different pieces of an application be handled by the database.
From the DBA perspective everything should be in the database, but developers will discuss that there are better tools available to handle things outside. This might not be always the case, but it might just be what both sides know or understand.
So, what is really valueable are discussions to understand and examples to demonstrate different areas. And this is not just one sided, hearing how they use the tools they have for creating processes is just as important for a DBA to understand and not dismiss as stuff outside of the database just happening. For some procesess on the database side, just saying it is really easy to load flat files into the database to perform ETL against them, is not enough if someone is not fimilar with how. Creating an example of an external table and some stored procedure for them to look at is better. But even better find out about a need that they have and teach them how to use these tools, such as external tables to see how it works for them in this situtation. They will then have a new tool in their belt to use, and be able to determine if it was valuable for them because it could have solved the problem faster or easier for them to learn. Being willing to understand both sides of how to solve a problem and being willing to work through solutions using different methods will present opportunities to share some of the database features and available options. Of course be prepared to also learn something as well, if there are some cool tools that they have to handle other pieces.
I enjoy these discussions and coming up with ways to solve business needs by using database technologies, and I hope for more open discussions and healthy debates to come up with better solutions.
