So this month’s blog party is being held by non-other than Steve Jones (blog|@Way0utwest) of SQL Server Central fame. This month’s topic is all about the business, your customers, clients etc asking for something but not really knowing what they are asking for. Or  in my interpretation the business, client, customer, telling you the technology or methodology or tool to use instead of what really they should be telling  you…what the business wants. Steve’s example of in his post sums in it up perfectly.

I have many examples to draw on here, I guess the one that springs to mind the most was a client that told me they wanted to ‘Shrink the Database’ as part of their maintenance routines. When I asked why? that’s self defeating. I was told that the databases were growing uncontrollably and this needed to be included in order to keep the systems up and running and to avoid eating up all available disk space. Smelling a rat I decided to do a little investigation of my own and I found that they had several databases that were in full recovery mode BUT they were not taking regular transaction log backups. When I mentioned this to my clients and explained the difference between simple and full recovery mode and what it meant in terms of point in time recovery we decided that maybe some regular transaction log backup were in fact needed. we then re-sized the log and freed up a lot of space and my client was very happy.

Anyway that’s my post for the last TSQL Tuesday of 2010, It is a very interesting, if not possibly controversial topic for someand I’m sure that many of the community will have examples of their own and I look forward to reading them and how others have overcome these issues.