Are You a Traffic Cop?

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Are You a Traffic Cop?

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736255 More actions · Answer 1

David.Poole - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 2:39 AM
Quite possibly the thing that needs fixing may not be the individual but the environment in which they work.

Very true. It's usually environment and culture that lead to these practices, though sometimes the person brings that culture as well.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736255 More actions · Answer 2

Sean Lange - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 7:30 AM
I have been begging for a help desk system for the entire time I have been here...10 years this summer. When I started here they used zip files to pass code around and had not even heard of source control. In fairness we are not an IT business, we are in manufacturing. But our entire ERP was written in house and been in place for more than 30 years. How they managed it without any source code is a miracle.

If you produce code, then you're a software business. You might do something else for revenue, but you're in the software business, or as someone said, "every business is a software business."

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240242478/Satya-Nadella-Every-business-will-be-a-software-business
https://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/11/30/now-every-company-is-a-software-company/#66b0129ef3b1
https://www.facebook.com/HBR/videos/10154460492802787/

Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286590 More actions · Answer 3

bmg002 - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 8:57 AM
Sean Lange - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 7:30 AM
bmg002 - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:49 PM
Sean Lange - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:34 PM
To be fair I think nearly everyone works in an atypical place. Sort of like everybody's family is weird. Find me a place of employment or family that isn't eccentric in some way or another. For example, in our place we don't really have a DBA, nor do we have an actual help desk. The users encounter an error and they may contact the development manager, the CIO or the developer they know the best. We are all somewhat responsible for routing these issues to the right person. As a developer I always assume it must be my code that is bad, I know the dummy who wrote it. 🙂 Sadly if it is a DB problem, well I know the dummy who designed it....it is the same dummy who wrote the bad code.
I've been in that boat too. Thankfully I am not the sole developer or sole DBA where I work. We have a policy in place that a developer cannot realease their own code (myself included). So if my application does something on the database, I need the other DBA to do the release for me. The other sucker... I mean DBA also gets the joy of doing code review for me. I feel bad for anybody that has to review my code.
And I do agree that everyone works in an atypical place. I do recommend getting a help desk like application in place though. We used to not have one and we implemented an expensive piece of junk 9 years ago then replaced that with something decent (but not excellent) 7 years ago. But prior to having one in place, we had a lot of people contacting support persons directly and it meant that some support staff was stupid busy and others were bored. And if somebody took a day off, it could be that an email would go unnoticed for a day (or more).
I also know my code is bad. It generally does what it is supposed to; not always the most efficient, not always the prettiest code, but it generally does what I expect it to do... or it crashes in a horrible mess. But the crashing I usually catch in our test environments before it hits live... well, unless a windows update causes it to explode... What is fun is trying to figure out if my code is bad in C# or if it is a bad stored procedure or trigger.
I have been begging for a help desk system for the entire time I have been here...10 years this summer. When I started here they used zip files to pass code around and had not even heard of source control. In fairness we are not an IT business, we are in manufacturing. But our entire ERP was written in house and been in place for more than 30 years. How they managed it without any source code is a miracle.
oh wow... I feel for you then. We are in manufacturing as well, but are big enough that running without source control (especially when there are free solutions out there) is just scary. BUT we do have some applications used in production that have no source code and thus are stuck on Windows XP (or with 1 program... windows 95... but thankfully we don't make that product anymore).
as for help desk, there are "free" solutions if you have no budget. Mind you "free" still means somebody has to support it and it still requires an OS license, unless you piggyback your systems.
We are a company of approximately 500 people and we only recently got a document control system in place. Mind you, it is for a very small department (7 people) and we are using the community edition so if anything goes sour, we have no support. And we don't have any real TSQL source control in place. We have tools in place to watch for any schema level changes, but it is more of a monitoring tool than revision control.

Yeah I have pushed for the the free ones and was met with resistance to the management part of it. Sounds like were are about the same size organization, except we are international. We have source control now, have for nearly a decade. That was one of my requirements right after I started that it get implemented.

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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/

Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286590 More actions · Answer 4

Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 9:32 AM
Sean Lange - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 7:30 AM
I have been begging for a help desk system for the entire time I have been here...10 years this summer. When I started here they used zip files to pass code around and had not even heard of source control. In fairness we are not an IT business, we are in manufacturing. But our entire ERP was written in house and been in place for more than 30 years. How they managed it without any source code is a miracle.
If you produce code, then you're a software business. You might do something else for revenue, but you're in the software business, or as someone said, "every business is a software business."
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240242478/Satya-Nadella-Every-business-will-be-a-software-business
https://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/11/30/now-every-company-is-a-software-company/#66b0129ef3b1
https://www.facebook.com/HBR/videos/10154460492802787/

True enough. We write software to run the business and ecommerce. I suppose you could say we have a small software department in our company.

_______________________________________________________________

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/

Mr. Brian Gale SSC-Insane Points: 24800 More actions · Answer 5

Sean Lange - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 9:42 AM
Yeah I have pushed for the the free ones and was met with resistance to the management part of it. Sounds like were are about the same size organization, except we are international. We have source control now, have for nearly a decade. That was one of my requirements right after I started that it get implemented.

We are partially international as well. We have locations in a few places outside Canada, but not that many.
And glad you at least have source control. That is critical when doing software development.
I don't get why they wouldn't want a support request system in place. there are so many good reasons to have it, and so few not to. Hopefully they get that in place soon.

The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 6

This all reminds me of one of my favorite T-Shirts and it's not limited to Developers, DBAs, Project Managers, or Managers...

Remember, the company you work for has to pass an audit, your data must be secure, the code has to produce the correct result, and it has to have good performance in the face of multiple billion rows tables.

And, dammit, NO! You cannot use an open text SSN for a f^%$#*! primary key. PERIOD!

p.s. Although I have to be the traffic cop, I also used to be a Developer and I help them meet their goals and I help keep management off their backs without slackin'.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

lianvh 89542 SSCommitted Points: 1561 More actions · Answer 7

lianvh 89542

SSCommitted

Points: 1561

September 7, 2022 at 7:23 am

#4084763

DBA = DO your BACKUP UPS.

Michael L John One Orange Chip Points: 27056 More actions · Answer 8

lianvh 89542 wrote:

DBA = DO your BACKUP UPS.

No, do your restores

Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
To properly post on a forum:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 9

lianvh 89542 wrote:

DBA = DO your BACKUP UPS.

Hopefully you don't think that's all a good DBA does.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.