I spend quite a bit of time looking at the questions on different forums; SQLServerCentral, Quora, Stack Exchange, others. One thing that depresses me just a bit is the desperation you can feel coming off of people. They have either put themselves into, or discovered that they are in, seriously dire straits. They are over their head in terms of experience or technology. Systems are completely beyond their control or current understanding. It’s one of the main reasons I try to help, because I’ve been there.

Unfortunately though, all too often, these same desperate people really don’t want to hear your advice or suggestions for a solution. The reason? It involves more than one button. The truly desperate, those who are utterly over their heads, frequently can’t even begin to process what you’re telling them. They don’t have the knowledge to solve their problem, no. However, they also don’t have the knowledge to understand the solution you’re proposing. It simply adds to their desperation. They grasp at the most flimsy of straws. It’s why you see questions with crazy solutions worked in, “We shrink the database every 15 minutes using a script”, “We set the database to simple four times a day, then back to full”, “We scheduled an automated reboot of the system once a week”… OK, that last one was me back in the SQL Server 6.5 days, but you get the idea.

The problem gets even worse. Frequently, maybe even a majority of the time, if they typed their exact question into a search window, the very first result, in Bing, DuckDuckGo and Google, has exactly the answer they need. So does the second, and the third. The fourth one is usually rubbish. Yet, these people who clearly don’t have many resources, yet were able to find SQLServerCentral, or Quora, or any of the others, were not able to do that simple, immediate, step of typing their question into the search engine. Or, did they, and did they click on that link and did they see the answer and are we back to the fact that the answer didn’t involve pushing the “go faster” button, so we’re back to the first problem.

Let me add the final wrinkle to this horror show. We can’t seem to reach these people. I don’t know where they are on the internet. I don’t know how to get my blog, or the SQLServerCentral and SimpleTalk articles or all the other blogs and articles linked here on Database Weekly in front of these people.  How are they able to hide so very well that we can’t get them the information they need?

I am trying to help. It’s a big part of what I do. Yet, if I can’t solve that last little wrinkle, we’re going to keep seeing “well, I’ve put NOLOCK” on every query in the system and it’s still slow, now what” questions. I know we all start somewhere. I know we all come from a position of gross ignorance (especially me). I also know we don’t have to stay there. It’s an act of will to move beyond that state. How do we reach these people and give them the right push so that they can start to use all the resources we have out there?