As a parent of two soon-to-be-asking-for-the-car-keys tweens, I came across this post the other day and found it struck a chord with me. I’ve gotten the eye-rolls from my daughter for everything on that list by now. My son is younger but I am certain he will also hit a point where everything on that list will earn his scorn as well.
After some thought I realized that the items on that list are not only applicable to tweens, they apply to DBAs also. And with a few modifications we can have our own list of phrases that will often result in eye-rolls, grimaces, and general grunting from your DBA.
So, here’s my list of 42 things you should never, ever say to your DBA.
As always, you’re welcome.
1. How was the status meeting?
2. What’s wrong?
3. How much longer?
4. Are you in a bad mood?
5. Hi.
6. You can’t possibly still be hungry.
7. Why are you doing that?
8. But I read on a blog that this would work.
9. Where are you?
10. Where were you?
11. Where are you going?
12. But…
13. Hello.
14. Want some help?
15. Do you know how we do that in MS Access?
16. I knew that would work.
17. Are you tired?
18. Can you set all the passwords to be the same?
19. I did that as a junior DBA once.
20. Will you be late with your weekly status report?
21. Go say “hi” to the developers.
22. Can you give me a quick download of the customer database?
23. Why won’t you tell me what you did?
24. Smile! You’re prettier when you smile.
25. Can I go with you to the datacenter?
26. It’s cool, it worked fine in dev.
27. Are you done yet?
28. You know you have to wear pants tomorrow, right?
29. How many rows fit in the product table?
30. I need you to restore this one row.
31. Do you know the syntax for restoring a database?
32. Can you email me the SA password?
33. Do you know where we keep the backups?
34. Why are you always so grumpy?
35. Do you always say “No”?
36. That’s not agile.
37. There’s no more bacon.
38. I got an error. Can you help?
39. Why don’t you just do what the developer is telling you to do?
40. Do you know who I am?
41. There’s this NOLOCK trick I heard about.
42. Good news. We found 5 really cheap DBAs to help you out.
Now I’m thinking we need a similar list for developers, architects, and sys admins. It seems my work is never done!
I saw this thing on a web site somewhere, forget where, but please run this SA level SQL in PROD and then …
Yes, of course!
After working on client site for a few weeks, one day in walks…
Client Business Management Team Manager: “I just realised some of my ad-hoc SQL that I ran late one evening last week on production updated probably I’d guess about half a million rows that it shouldn’t have done. You can quickly restore those, right… and then I can quickly run some SQL to patch it up”.
*sigh*
These are all so true! Great list!
I can’t stand getting that IM that just says “hi” when you know they want something. Great list!
Hi.
LOL Hi! At least I know you don’t really want anything 🙂
I thought that I was the only one that hated that. They would say “Hi” and wait until I would respond back with another “Hi”. Usually I would just not respond until they asked the actual question, which seemed to annoy them.
No one ever contacts us just to say “thanks”. Never once did I get “hey, thanks for that query working correctly just now.” We only get contacted when we are needed to fix something.
Of course that’s not unique to DBAs, but I actually prefer a “hello” instead of having someone just throw a question at me or asking me a question. Guess I’m just weird…
There’s an Operations Analyst in the business that sounded like he really knew what he was talking about in the planning meeting and took a database class in grad school; can we give him access to run queries against the Production OLTP system?
Yes, of course! In fact, make him a sysadmin, just in case.
We used to have a user where I work who would email our SQL group with things like “I need this view created” followed by some large chunk of SQL code joining multiple tables. At the time we were told “he knows what he is doing, just make the view”. So we ended up having several views created by us on live servers that he had written with no explanation (usually) about why it was needed or where it would be used.
We’ve since trained him better to tell us what he is looking for and we write the code for him. Sometimes the data he was requesting in the view was just too large for a view to utilize properly and a new table with the data all pre-calculated and stored in a data warehouse just worked so much better.
Yes, all too often I’ve seen similar stories where the DBA is expected to do as they are told and not ask questions.
Just love the list from both the DBA side and the tween side. Nice use of betterthanstockphotos.com image 🙂
Thanks Dave!
So, our IDENTITY column ran out of integers. You can update 2bn rows to bigint in 10 minutes right?
Of course!
it works fine in dev, i cant understand why is doesn’t work in production, can you give me access and i’ll have a go at fixing in prod
That sounds familiar.
Also, “Can you make it work just like it does in Access?”
Yes! I asked the user to send me the query, and I got the whole ACCESS DB in return. LOL.
User did not have select granted—-> DBA gets entire DB emailed
Brilliant!
Yeah, and “That’s not how it works in Oracle”
I always enjoyed the email saying “I can’t connect to the database, please fix”, or “The database isn’t working”.
I have 40 SQL instances with 50 databases on each, but of course I’m psychic, so I know exactly which one you mean!
In the end I created a database called “TheDatabase” and created a proc called “MyProc” which returned a message saying “I’ve just run MyProc in TheDatabase, and it seems fine to me – maybe you mean a different database?”
Oh, yes! I would get those messages as well. To make things even more complicated, the apps would use a dozen or so different databases. So I would at least be told which app was having issues, but no one would know which database, or server. But the “please fix” messages…yeah…good times.
Can you kill everyone else’s connections so my query runs faster?
No, because someone else just called and asked the same thing, and I killed your query already.
No, because I already killed your query at the request of someone else.
Is it because I didn’t use NOLOCK?
Likely.
We’re moving data centers friday.
Ha! I recall a meeting once where we spent an hour or so talking with the business team about aspects of a GUI they were using; colors, fonts, column widths, etc. At the end of the meeting the business lead says “Oh, by the way, we’re changing banks next week, I hops that’s not an issue for anyone.”
we’ve got this data we need moved from this one database to another, it’s only 500 tables, and the destination already has some data that can’t be overwritten, what do you think end of business?
I had a request last week from an upper manager: “Can you run a query on the database telling me what I forgot to do?” My answer: “No, sorry; we have issues connecting to God’s database!”
“I ran an update and forgot the where clause…”
Actually a true story which updated 1.8m phone numbers for a customer & billing application.
Yeah, that *does* happen every now and then.
My favorite “is there any locking going on in the database?” My answer is always “Yes”.
Pretty much guaranteed, yes.
“quick download of the customer database”
Hear this one all the time. And I’d bet a good number of DBAs have no problem doing that. Unfortunately.
43: We’re out of coffee.
Missed that, will add it to the updated list.
This SQL Server is too slow. Can we move to Unix?
Why do we need to store records in table if we can store them in a file?
We don’t need a backup, we have log shipping!
Yeah, that’s painfully familiar to me.
“The SharePoint site is slow! Can you see anything?”