Steve is presenting at an event today out of town, so we have a guest editorial.

Have you ever wondered how everyday life would pan out if you took the DBA approach to life's events? Here are a few thoughts.

Backups: You have a nightly backup routine. This means a differential backup every night, when you tell your spouse everything that has happened during the day in minute detail, and a full backup on weekends when you tell them everything that has happened during the week in your entire life. I Don't think either of you would sleep much.

Replication: You are on the phone continuously, telling your twin sibling at a remote location everything that you are experiencing. Everything. What you see, hear, smell, eat, work on etc. Your twin, of course, has no life of her own, and is living vicariously through you, ever prepared for you to drop dead so she can take over. Talk about sibling rivalry.

Restores: Remember that nightly backup you transferred to your spouse earlier? You periodically and randomly ask your spouse to repeat some of those conversations back to you, ensuring no detail is skipped, so you can confirm that the backup is working. Marriage counselor's number handy?

Scans: When you go looking for the soy sauce in your pantry, you read the label on every single item in there: all the spices, all the jars and bottles, every bag of chips, every bottle of juice and soda, everything, because the items are arranged in no particular order. It takes you a few hours to put together one meal, and your kids have gone to bed hungry.

Seeks: After scanning through your pantry multiple times and getting tired of how long it takes each time, you decide to rearrange all the items in order by alphabet. Now you can retrieve the soy sauce in no time. The kids are happy again.

Fragmentation and Re-indexing: Over time, as your spouse adds items to the pantry at random locations (because he is not a DBA) and removes items leaving gaps on the shelves, the ordering gets so out of whack that you revert to going through all items again to find the soy sauce. Eventually, you decide to create an automated re-indexing plan by having your spouse rearrange everything by alphabet once a week. Divorce lawyer's number handy?

More Backups (because, you know, a DBA can never have enough backups): When you prepare a sandwich for your kid's school lunch, you also make a second sandwich. You pack the first one in your child's lunch box, and you courier the second one to arrive at school just in time for lunch. You don't tell anybody that you have a third one in your car, you know, just in case...

Adding Records: When you discuss baby names with your spouse for the upcoming addition to your family, you very briefly consider an integer for the name, and then even more briefly think that a tinyint would be more appropriate, before you think of the divorce lawyer and decide to shut up. You do, however, bring up the Bobby Tables joke because you think it's funny. Your spouse does not.

Searching: You wonder on a daily basis why you can't just enter this into Google's search box: select * from closeby_restaurants where cuisine = 'chinese' and distance_from_home <= 2 miles and deliciousness = 'awesome' and service_time = 'quick'...

Normalization: When your spouse asks you for a copy of your shopping list before he goes shopping, you point him to the location of the original list instead because you do not want to create duplicates. He throws his hands up and leaves without your list. Your items never get bought.

Normalization 2: You do not have a driver's license, or a bank account, or a passport, or a mortgage in your name, because you are incapable of filling out any forms in duplicate, leave alone triplicate.

Set-based Operations: After the kids have gone to bed and you sit down with your spouse to watch some TV, you roll out all the TVs, desktops, laptops, tablets and phones in your house into the living room and fire up a different episode of your favorite show on each one at the same time, because you know that set-based operations are better than episode-by-agonizing-episode. The kids were very entertained when you did this with their cartoons. But the spouse - not so much.

If your domestic life isn't exactly a picture of happiness and you're getting grief from your spouse, kids, and siblings, now you know why. You're a DBA!