I’ve always enjoyed watching Criss Angel perform street magic. For me there is just something about his style that works. I forget at what point he started his show Mindfreak, but I used to watch it on a semi-frequent basis. I think part of the appeal for me is how he is able to really cast doubt into people’s minds. I mean, he can’t really walk on water, can he? No, but he can cast a doubt in your mind during his show.
The other day I was exchanging emails with Curt Triplett (blog) and he mentioned that he sees a “Mindfreak” in many companies these days with regards to query performance. What does he mean by that? Well, Curt essentially sees two types of DBAs:
- DBAs that are not responsible for query performance (think architects, or someone more hardware focused), or
- DBAs that don’t have the necessary time for query performance tuning (that’s just about everyone)
What resonated with me was my own experience as a production DBA. My team was surely seen as being responsible for query performance, but with over 3,000 databases and almost 200 instances for our team of four it was a tad unrealistic to believe that we had the time to stay on top of query performance. Until it broke, of course, and then it was our responsibility (of course).
But the funny thing is that even though it was our responsibility to fix, we could have told you a dozen different ways that the issue could have been avoided altogether. Our team would have told you that query performance was a shared responsibility between many different groups: architects, developers, DBAs, server engineers, network admins, etc.
But we were fortunate to have many different teams with many different people on those teams and still nobody was analyzing query performance with focus day in and day out. Our small team would not scale well enough to cover the volume of queries that were being executed daily. What about shops where there are only a handful of folks? What about the shops that don’t even have a DBA? (Yes, they do exist, we all know his). The thing is, in both types of shops, who owns the process for query performance tuning?
Nobody does. That’s who. It isn’t even a shared responsibility, sadly. It is just something tucked inside a very busy DBA job description or shoved aside until it can’t be ignored any longer.
Mindfreak, huh? Starting to doubt who owns the process in your shop also?
On Wednesday, December 7th at 12 PM ET Confio is hosting a webinar with Curt titled “Query Performance Tuning – The Missing Link In Your IT Department”. You can register here. I’ll be there as well, answering questions in the chat session while Curt is presenting.
Come find out how you can improve the performance tuning process in your own shop, and overall query performance as a result.
I see this gap all the time.
Devs who use tools that generate TSQL claim there is nothing they can do to change the queries without messing up their processes, DBAs who don’t have time or skills to tune, and Data Architects who don’t have the skills to help much.
I think we have a huge gap in this area and it’s growing.
(thanks for the Criss pic, BTW)