December 23, 2008 at 7:10 am
DBAs and Developers seem to live in parallel universes. If and when they talk to each other, the air is often thick with misunderstanding. It seems that what we have here is a deep-seated communication problem. Although the two groups share a common technical language, they use terms slightly differently. A 'domain', 'transaction', 'object', 'entity' or a 'framework', for example, has subtly different meanings to the two camps. When a problem occurs, tensions can quickly rise as confusions in terminology get misinterpreted as accusations of blame. In short, communication between the two groups is shot through with a sort of cognitive dissonance, akin perhaps to a continuous Stroop effect.
I'm reminded of a short blog post by Seth Godin, in which an angry woman orders a "double double" and responds to the bemusement of the coffee shop attendant by simply repeating the same phrase, only louder. It's a pattern I see frequently in the interaction of DBAs and developers. Sometimes you need to find a different way to explain things.
Perhaps the answer is to create a new, mutually understood, language. When different cultures come together for a common purpose they often develop a new language to deal with the struggle. In the Great War, for example, the British army was peopled with a vast array of different cultures. In a spirit of camaraderie, they developed a private language, adopting words or phrases from different cultures, and giving them a new ironic meaning. Some of my favourite examples include archie, bar-poo, Asiatic Annie, belati (blighty), make a bogey, bondock, bun-strangler, cat-stabber, conk out, Dub-dub and Flaming Onions.
In the holiday spirit of enhancing kinship and fraternal feeling, we propose the development of a new common language for developers and DBAs. We encourage you to contribute your terms and definitions. The best entry, added as a comment to the editorial blog, will receive a pair of Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones, and the best runners-up will get Amazon vouchers or Simple-Talk gift bags.
To get things started, how about these:
Bar-Poo – To rush around prophesying that a project is doomed
BitHog – Memory intensive process
Bun-strangler – Teetotaller
Cookie – CPU
Cookie monster – CPU-hungry stored procedure
Data-dodger – Someone who is never around when the application hits data issues
DBA-AwayDay – DBA is closeted in the server room and won't come out
Deadlock holiday – Production system dies due to too many deadlocks
Doing a Gordon – Managing to break everything all at once
Domain Knowledge – Unhealthy interest in Middle-Earth
Dormouse – Anyone advocating, or using, Hibernate
Fluffer – Malfunctioning trigger
Freezing Temp DB – The effect of putting an exclusive lock on TempDB.
Gone Mae West (Syn: Gone dolly) – Database is bust, big time.
Grapeshot – Too many instructions and directives flying around everywhere
Heaphazard – Erratic indexing
Heaptastic – No indexing
Icarus – Anyone with a fascination for 'cloud' computing
Keyboard-junkie – Developer who types in code before planning
Kuntrachi – A contractor
Object of derision – Proselytizer of object databases
RastaBase – Any database prone to deadlocks
Serialisation – Turning a good book into a bad TV series.
Table-monkey – A developer who insists on access to base tables
Thremple – Endanger database by placing undue pressure on tempdb (e.g. to give a database a good thrempling)
TSQL Tourniquet – Code that encourages SQL Injection
December 23, 2008 at 8:06 am
December 23, 2008 at 8:23 am
here is another good thing to send around the work place for a laugh..
December 23, 2008 at 8:31 am
Thanks for the laughs today. Kinda boring in the office, so a little humor is a good thing.
Jonathan Kehayias | Principal Consultant | MCM: SQL Server 2008
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Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for Accidental DBAs[/url]
December 23, 2008 at 8:34 am
heh np, i know the feeling it's a bit slow this week at my office also =/, but hey I figured I could now offically start posting in the 2008 board!! I get to stand up 2008 clusters w00t. 😀
December 23, 2008 at 8:37 am
Nice, never heard of most of them, but I bet they'd be funny at the right time.
December 23, 2008 at 8:49 am
Just a note on the slang thing, it's interesting how a lot of these things come about, for example "Limey's". This comes from a time when ships sailing the Atlantic with a large crew of British soldiers would eat a great deal of limes in order to prevent scurvy, a particularly nasty illness leading to severe illness (not going to go into details in case folks are a little squirmish.
The reason for the limes was that other fruits would spoil on the long boat rides, and the fact that limes do not spoil meant that they were the only source of vitamin C that the sailors and soldiers could get.
December 23, 2008 at 10:23 am
Just a heads-up. This is a copy of Tony's editorial for this week from Simple Talk - http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/tony_davis/archive/2008/12/19/70941.aspx
Scott, is this reposted with permission?
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
December 23, 2008 at 10:29 am
GilaMonster (12/23/2008)
Just a heads-up. This is a copy of Tony's editorial for this week from Simple Talk - http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/tony_davis/archive/2008/12/19/70941.aspxScott, is this reposted with permission?
Didn't realize a chain email / blogs required permission, if that's the case then no. Does it count if the person who emailed it to me gave me permission? 😀
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