The other day I asked myself “What is it you enjoy most about your job?” After thinking for a day or so, trying to find something enjoyable about where I am, and what I do, it finally came to me. So I said to myself, “Self, what I enjoy most about my job are the crazy requests that we get, seemingly every day.” Yes, it is those Dilbert-like requests that keep me coming back here. It is addictive. I sit here and wonder what will surprise me next, and I am rarely disappointed.
The crazy requests do a nice job of offsetting the crazy things that happen around here. And it certainly helps to lighten things after being in a meeting where other attendees cannot give a consistent answer. I swear, I could ask “What color is the sky right now” and get back a different answer from three different people. I think that may be the most frustrating thing I deal with. I ask a simple question like “How is your application connecting to the database?” I will then be told “we use a SQL login in our config file”. Then, two questions later, I am told that they are using Windows Authentication to connect. Well? Which is it?
I thought face-to-face communication is supposed to be superior to a phone call, or email, but often times it can be more frustrating than both. Maybe it would be nice if I could just read the specs for the application…oops.
Anyway, this rant is about the crazy requests, and how they keep me coming to work each day. I am going to do my best to keep tabs on them as they come in, making a list, but I do not want to single people out and think I am making fun of them. That would not be appropriate for this forum. I do, however, want to share with you some of the more humorous stories. Of course, they are only humorous to geeks like us, but why should that stop me? I will do my best to share stories whenever possible and take steps to avoid embarrassing anyone.
So, the other morning I am enjoying my coffee and going through the stack of emails that come in overnight. The usual failures, issues, blah, blah, blah…and then it hits me. The crazy request that will keep me going through the day. It simply read:
“Please increase the size of the data page for the database, and let me know when it is done.”
Simple request right? Hey, I was fooled, because I started trying to figure out how that was even possible for this instance of Sybase we were running. Since the request was so straightforward, I assumed they knew something that I did not. Actually, I always assume that the requester either knows more than me, or at least knows what they are talking about. Usually the opposite is true, and they know nothing about what they speak. Such was the case here as well.
Remembering back to when we installed the Sybase ASE instance, I recalled that at that time we set the size of the data page. Once set, it is not changed. Also, it is a setting for the instance, and not for a database. In other words, there was nothing for me to do, except to create a new instance. But how would I ever do a restore to that new instance? I was guessing they would fail.
At that point I did my best to explain that the request could not be fulfilled, and that he should not wait for it to get done anytime soon. I then started to ask some basic questions. You know, something along the lines of “why would you ever even think to request this?”
Well, it turns out that within a stored procedure he had created, he was using a temp table. And that temp table had a handful of columns. And the total size of the datatypes in the columns exceed the limit allowed by the instance. The error message said something to the effect that the database had a page size limit of 2k, and thus he sent his note telling us to increase it. At least he was polite about it, which was nice. Clueless, but nice.
The request was enough to keep me laughing, and it has for months now. But even better than that has to be the fact that the real issue was the code. The code, and the fact that the person writing the code had no understanding of database design. And, instead of asking for help that something was not working, we get a request to fix things in order to make his code work. And that seems to be very common these days.
I wish I could think that way, except I am always wondering what I did wrong, and not immediately thinking that what I did was perfect, and looking to find fault elsewhere.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go add extra transaction logs to a database because someone decided it would be the best way to increase performance by writing the log to multiple disks, and they sent us an email and are waiting to hear back once it is done.
