Bear with me as I wax philosophical for two sentences.  Our societies are becoming more polarized with each passing day.  We see this in spirituality, politics, family life, and most other aspects of our lives.  As IT professionals, our careers are impacted by this polarization.  There are pressures for us to become specialized into niches to maintain our goals, both company and personal, as they continue to climb higher year after year.

With this polarization comes a natural creation of a void in between the extremes.  Those with common knowledge between the areas of specialties are becoming increasingly scarce.  Organizations are fighting to fill this gap by labeling new positions as something along the lines of “Database Developer”, or formally realigning the duties of developers into this middle space.  The job of these individuals is to gain a measure of expertise in both the disciplines and stand as the bridge between the worlds of the specialized developer and the specialized database administrator.

I have spent most of my career as a consultant who stood in this gap.  This has allowed me to gain knowledge and understanding of what this role entails.  For most of the past decade, my concentration has been on SQL Server and .Net, with some notable exceptions, and it is to those technologies that I will discuss detailed implementations.

I will be posting articles to aid those learning “the database side of things” to fill the gap.  It’s a good gap… own it!

Ben Vegiard,
www.activeinfosys.com
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