One's Missing
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Since the industry does not pay too much attention to SQL and most companies think writing SQL is easy. That's why we had a hard time to find a good SQL Server developer, we even have a hard time to find a good SQL Server DBA.
Yes maybe writing SQL is easy, I recently found a procedure that ran 3 hours each day. It produced the correct results and no one complained. It was so terribly coded, I changed it and it ran 3 minutes. Unfortunately the management did not care !
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Management here has no idea what I do. They just know that after 3 other AS400 administrators, there have always been complaints about performance, and bugs, and that the vast majority of those complaints stopped shortly after I took over. (not to mention I actually fix problems instead of just saying I'll look into it when I get the chance).
Although, at our shop, AS400 falls under distribution, and IT is a seperate department, so, I think I bug IT when I start making them rewrite their stored procedures to access the system properly, or to include the 'unused' company field that triggers index use.... I'm lucky though. I have most of them trained to send me any query that runs for more then 2 min so that I can optimize it for them... I'd like to get it down to anything that runs more then 10 sec... but... I do have limited time
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Now that's something I can understand. I'm actually a senior IT kinda guy (been programming for 20 years) but I work for a decidedly non-IT department. Management really doesn't know what I do, just that "it works" or "it's down". Fortunately, I have managed to build a good working relationship with IT despite coming into a situation where there was some bad blood between departments.
Back on topic: As an IT guy in a non-IT department, I need to be ultra flexible in how I do things as I don't really have IT type resources behind me. Knowing multiple languages and multiple ways to get things done is vital. I could not do my job without a good working knowledge of SQL.
What I don't understand is how you can be in IT for any length of time as a developer and not need to know SQL? Yes, you need a GUI or SOAP or some other interface to collect data, but then what do you do with it? Data needs to be stored *somewhere* and that means a database - and that means SQL.
Steve G.
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I think my position comes from being at the same .com for over 6 years, and working with AS400s for more like 12, and doing various types of IT work for more like 20 years. My resume is one of those ones that makes me look older then I actually am (I have overlap, and actually have more years of work experience then I've been alive)
Over the years, I slowly moved away from development to hardware/networking, and back to development again. One thing that has stuck out at me in recent years is that even though I'm a developer, even though I program some moderately large scale apps, one thing is consistant, EVERYTHING uses a database. More to the point, with some of the functions I've written for ASP coding, I barely actually touch the ASP, and instead simply write queries, build some HTML around them, and call a function with a SQL, or stored procedure parameter, and let the function do everything else I need the page to do. Really, my job has turned into database development more then anything else (combined with a couple hours a day of as/400 system maintenance).
I just really don't understand why SQL isn't seen as more important. I've seen a ton of projects over the past decade, and almost every single one has required a database back-end... Now... there are plenty of things that don't, but, most of us work for companies that use software, not companies that make software... and for us, the oportunity to build something truely stand alone (a word processor, a game, a spreadsheet, device drivers, image editors, etc) are just simply not there. Everything needs to tie into our central systems. everything needs to lock together nice and clean... and what we write is either a report, or needs a level of configurability/scaleability that goes beyond a simple stand-alone app with some text based config files, or non-db storage medium.
and now with Reporting Services, and .net, we REALLY do very little programming. we just do some dragging, dropping, and pass in some SQL from a nice GUI.
<back-in-the-day-mode>
Why, back when I was learning ASP, we had to write our OWN functions to display results, none of this fancy control stuff. Back then we had to code our way into functionality by hand! both ways! in the snow! with no keyboards!
</back-in-the-day-mode>
and now back to our regularly scheduled work-day.
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