Thankfully I had yet another cross country flight yesterday. Why thankfully? Because the travel gives me ample time (and booze) to think about things like “If there was a DBA reality television show, what would it be like?” I started with the basics, something in a Survivor format, maybe a Big Brother, or The Apprentice, but none of them really seemed right. Then I thought about Rockstar, and how that seemed to fit best of all, for a variety of reasons, and then it hit me like a can of Mr. T’s Bloody Mary mix.
Chris Hansen starring in “To Catch a Developer”.
I do not want to single out developers, because there are plenty of other people we need to catch as well, so we can haggle over the name of this soon-to-be-number-one reality show later. But imagine, if you will, the format of the show. We engage in chat sessions with someone, let’s use a developer as an example. We discuss some piece of technology, perhaps one that is ten years old like DTS packages, and arrange to meet with the developer in the lunch room to discuss in person. The developer shows up, Chris Hansen walks in afterwards, and starts asking all sorts of questions.
Chris: “Do you know how old DTS is? What were you thinking? And you were not going to batch your transactions? Do you know what that will do to your log file?”
Developer: “I swear man, it was just talk, that’s all it was. I wasn’t going to do anything. I came here to tell my DBA that we needed to go our separate ways.”
Chris: “Just talk? It’s a lot of talk. I’ve got the transcript right here. You say here ‘I want to cursor through all your rows’. Man, that’s just wrong.”
Developer: “I know, I know. I’m getting help. The other day I bought a book on SQL 2005. And I am willing to do whatever I can to help you guys. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
Chris: “Help us?”
Developer: “Yeah, with whatever.”
Chris: “There’s the door. Go tell your friends we’re watching. And the next time they hand us deployment instructions that are more complicated than a NASA launch sequence we’re coming after them.”
So, if anyone can put me in touch with Mr. Hansen it would be appreciated because this really needs to happen. We could use Mr. Hansen to confront anyone in IT that needs some help, and yes that could be other DBAs, or managers, or the business user. Anyone that needs to be set on the right path which is only achieved by sixteen cameras at all angles.
I am really looking forward to my flight home tonight.
UPDATE: It’s been over a day since I posted this and not one email from Chris Hansen. I thought the whole idea of Web 2.0 and social networking was that we are all supposed to be connected? And what about six degrees of separation? Surely someone reading this or my tweets can get Chris on the phone, no?
I will give this one more day and then I will need to turn to someone else to host the show. Not sure who, but right now I am leaning towards Steve Buscemi.
“instructions that are more complicated than a NASA launch sequence”
We must be working with the same Dev teams 🙂
Great article. Thoroughly enjoyed it.