The vast majority of us never work on high volume systems. And I mean high volume systems, like backing a web server that gets millions of hits in a few minutes, which might result in tens of millions of database queries in the same amount of time.

That's OK, those are high stress, high value systems, and the reality is that most of us probably would prefer to not deal with the problems and challenges of those systems. It sounds cool, but after a bunch of late nights, upset executives, high risk, and high demands, the high rewards might not be worth it.

At least not for me. I've done some work in the financial areas, which used to sound cool, but I can do without it at this point in my life.

The Colorado Rockies are in the World Series. What does that have to do with high volume systems? If you've been following the editorials, particularly the podcasts, you know I've been looking for tickets to the baseball championship to take my son. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, or potentially one, so I want to preserve the memories and enjoy it with my son. In my 40 years of life, I've never been in a city that was going to a championship in baseball, basketball, or football, and I'm excited.

So are millions of other people, including many of them in Colorado. For whatever reason, the Rockies have decided to only sell tickets from their website. There are issues with that, but those for another editorial, maybe tomorrow :). In any case, sales were set for Monday at 10am local time. I'd set up two computers in the office and was ready for the sale. 9:55am came and I clicked the links to buy tickets. I got a countdown page, which was what some friends also had. I expected it to jump over at 10:00am.

It didn't, I could never access the site and eventually got some errors about security and cookies, neither of which were accurate for these systems. I assumed tickets were sold out, jumped over to eBay and bought two for the opening game in Denver. It wasn't until hours later that I heard only 500 tickets (of 18,000) before their systems melted down.

Huh?

Their systems overloaded and melted down? I was under the impression that the entire league was running all the websites. Apparently that's not eh case as the Rockies decided to use Billy Bob's Homemade Ticketing system. Or the owner's brother or who know what other half-baked, dimwitted scheme set up by a few incompetent bleepity-bleeping-bleeps. If you're interested in the fiasco, you can read about it hereand here. Actually it's Paciolan that handles the tickets and I wouldn't go looking to invest in them anytime soon.

Haven't we seen enough of these overloads? I mean this is a problem that's been solved. Plenty of systems have failed and then been rebuilt to take loads. And it's not like the Rockies can't afford to hire a few consultants to actually tell them where things will break. Or they can't just hire someone like Ticketmaster to handle this.

There are all kinds of things I don't know how to do with computers. And I'm proud of the fact I know what I don't know. And you know that the most competent people I've met in this business; those that I really respect and admire.

They know it too.

Steve Jones

Podcast: The Voice of the DBA

Today I was a little rushed on the production side as my DSL went down, so apologies in advance.

Thanks for all the feedback and keep it coming. It definitely helps to hear what others think about the podcasts.

• Get Some Help (Video) - Quicktime, 9.5MB
• Get Some Help (Audio) - MP3, 5.7MB

Music for today's podcast from Joe Sibol, www.joesibol.com and on iTunes. Blindsided was appropriate for today's topic.