May 14, 2012 at 9:25 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Self Service SQL
May 15, 2012 at 3:35 am
It's just the same as the proliferation of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets out there and we have to control those somehow!
May 15, 2012 at 7:16 am
Don't trust users with infrastructure. I am currently cleaning up a small business that created 3 separate domains (because they had the notion that each server needed to be in a "domain"...) and set up 3 instances of SQL, one in each domain and now they say that because of PCI issues, they all must go into a single domain -- after running like this for two years! And of course they don't have the budget now for a guy like me to spend weeks fixing it...
Peter Trast
Microsoft Certified ...(insert many literal strings here)
Microsoft Design Architect with Alexander Open Systems
May 15, 2012 at 8:21 am
Peter Trast (5/15/2012)
Don't trust users with infrastructure.
That's a great general rule but there can be places it works well. The trick is that it's going to take work up front to make sure it gets pulled off well. Getting a solid base image together. Education on when it's appropriate. Followup to clean up anything that's no longer needed (or handle servers that aren't getting backed up.) So while it can be a nice service I don't know that doing it well would save time in the long run.
May 15, 2012 at 8:56 am
Peter Trast (5/15/2012)
Don't trust users with infrastructure.
As a developer with rudimentary hardware and DBA skills, I +1 this.
Jay Bienvenu | http://bienv.com | http://twitter.com/jbnv
May 15, 2012 at 9:18 am
jbnv (5/15/2012)
Peter Trast (5/15/2012)
Don't trust users with infrastructure.As a developer with rudimentary hardware and DBA skills, I +1 this.
Actually, as developed and promoted by Microsoft, Cloud is not Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) but Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are two significant differences: in PaaS formerly known as Azure, machines are stateless, and you do not maintain them individually. Every patch applied to the Cloud is automatically applied to all machines.
It is a different game.
May 15, 2012 at 9:19 am
How many of us have been faced with Access built by a user, everybody loves it, until it breaks or the creator leaves the company. In the past, I've been faced with 60 of these Access databases, trying to get them into MSSQL. Now I'm on a contract facing similar issues. oh well, user created instances will keep me employed.
May 15, 2012 at 9:45 am
/soapbox on
Yeah this just screams of bad things. I have referred to Access as "Corporate Cancer" for a long time. It seems that MS has decided we need fight an even tougher strain of cancer in the business world. You get people who are marginally technical setting up horribly designed, not normalized databases and they run applications of their own little "data silo". This then empowers these employees as the guardians of this type of data. It makes them feel important. This is the same type of mentality that used to exist in some programmers. "If you make it hard enough for somebody else to understand it then I can ensure my job". Then these poorly designed piles of stink become business critical and get handed off to IT to "make it work just like it does, only faster. Oh and we need this done by 2pm today because we are doing a demo". Then you open this thing up and discover that nothing short of a complete rewrite is needed to unravel the stack of poor design decisions made throughout the entire "development" of this thing.
How often do we see on this site decisions made by people who work as DBAs that are awful? These people are often trained for this work and still make bad decisions. How can somebody with little or no training come up with something good.
I know a little bit about chemistry. That does not mean that I should go down to the labs and start making something. I would likely blow the building up. I leave chemistry to the trained professionals. Databases and applications should be the same.
Perhaps I am a bit jaded and frustrated about this topic currently because I have been trying to unravel a massive Access application that runs a very critical aspect of our business. It was designed by somebody who had no business writing applications or working with data. Putting this stuff in the hands of people who are not competent will benefit the business in the short term, but in the long term it is awful.
/soapbox off
You may now resume your normal routine.
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May 15, 2012 at 10:06 am
The problem, IMO, is that in many orgs there is never enough time to do things right the first time, but always enough time to "revisit" them, unfortunately with the tail of the wrong decisions that were made under pressure in the first round.
If this cycle happens several times and no manager loses his or her job, the result is what you described.
May 15, 2012 at 10:10 am
Sean
I would just like to say ditto!
Bill Soranno
MCP, MCTS, MCITP DBA
Database Administrator
Winona State University
Maxwell 143
"Quality, like Success, is a Journey, not a Destination" - William Soranno '92
May 15, 2012 at 10:14 am
Revenant (5/15/2012)
The problem, IMO, is that in many orgs there is never enough time to do things right the first time, but always enough time to "revisit" them, unfortunately with the tail of the wrong decisions that were made under pressure in the first round.If this cycle happens several times and no manager loses his or her job, the result is what you described.
I frequently get asked to do things "half baked" and I routinely ask them when they are planning on the additional time to come back and fix it. If an estimate to do it right is two weeks but an inferior version could be hobbled together in one week, I ask them when they plan on giving me the three weeks later to come back and fix it. More often than not I end up getting my two weeks.
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Need help? Help us help you.
Read the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/ for best practices on asking questions.
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Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 1 – Converting Rows to Columns - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63681/
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 2 - Dynamic Cross Tabs - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Crosstab/65048/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 1) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 2) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/
May 15, 2012 at 11:22 am
How often do we see on this site decisions made by people who work as DBAs that are awful? These people are often trained for this work and still make bad decisions. How can somebody with little or no training come up with something good.
I know a little bit about chemistry. That does not mean that I should go down to the labs and start making something. I would likely blow the building up. I leave chemistry to the trained professionals. Databases and applications should be the same.
I see your point, and lots of time this is true. However people without any formal training, or doing things as a hobby come up with good ideas all the time. Lots of business people do a great job of analysis with data that you or I would never come up with.
We ought to enable some self-service, or some ideas, but limit the impact. The problem isn't someone building an Access app, it's that they build one and it is a good idea, it gets used more and more, without any investment being made to improve it to something that is more scalable or resilient to stress.
May 15, 2012 at 11:28 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (5/15/2012)
How often do we see on this site decisions made by people who work as DBAs that are awful? These people are often trained for this work and still make bad decisions. How can somebody with little or no training come up with something good.
I know a little bit about chemistry. That does not mean that I should go down to the labs and start making something. I would likely blow the building up. I leave chemistry to the trained professionals. Databases and applications should be the same.
I see your point, and lots of time this is true. However people without any formal training, or doing things as a hobby come up with good ideas all the time. Lots of business people do a great job of analysis with data that you or I would never come up with.
We ought to enable some self-service, or some ideas, but limit the impact. The problem isn't someone building an Access app, it's that they build one and it is a good idea, it gets used more and more, without any investment being made to improve it to something that is more scalable or resilient to stress.
I certainly would never want to stifle creativity or new ideas. That is truly the basis of the business we are in. The self-service side of the industry is one we will probably never get away from for the reasons you mentioned. It will also continue to be sort topic and lots of pain for the people who have to fix these apps for the reasons I mentioned.
It is a difficult balance with positives on both sides. I of course am biased towards making my life easier, which for me means to limit the amount self-service IT is available. 😛
_______________________________________________________________
Need help? Help us help you.
Read the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/ for best practices on asking questions.
Need to split a string? Try Jeff Modens splitter http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/.
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 1 – Converting Rows to Columns - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63681/
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 2 - Dynamic Cross Tabs - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Crosstab/65048/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 1) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 2) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/
May 15, 2012 at 11:41 am
Sean Lange (5/15/2012)
I certainly would never want to stifle creativity or new ideas. That is truly the basis of the business we are in. The self-service side of the industry is one we will probably never get away from for the reasons you mentioned. It will also continue to be sort topic and lots of pain for the people who have to fix these apps for the reasons I mentioned.It is a difficult balance with positives on both sides. I of course am biased towards making my life easier, which for me means to limit the amount self-service IT is available. 😛
I think most of us don't want to stifle creativity, but it's easy to get to be difficult and controlling when we are trying to make our jobs easier. I certainly feel the same way. I want to limit the number of times my phone rings for something being broken.
It's a balance, and really it depends on communicating to management when something needs investment and when it should be shut down.
May 15, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (5/15/2012)
Sean Lange (5/15/2012)
I certainly would never want to stifle creativity or new ideas. That is truly the basis of the business we are in. The self-service side of the industry is one we will probably never get away from for the reasons you mentioned. It will also continue to be sort topic and lots of pain for the people who have to fix these apps for the reasons I mentioned.It is a difficult balance with positives on both sides. I of course am biased towards making my life easier, which for me means to limit the amount self-service IT is available. 😛
I think most of us don't want to stifle creativity, but it's easy to get to be difficult and controlling when we are trying to make our jobs easier. I certainly feel the same way. I want to limit the number of times my phone rings for something being broken.
It's a balance, and really it depends on communicating to management when something needs investment and when it should be shut down.
... and on management's willingness to hear the message.
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