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January 2009 - Posts
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There are certain jobs in life that are more glamorous then others. If someone asks what you do for a living and you answer fire fighter or pilot then the response is a lot different to someone that responds 'I am a tax accountant'. I think one of the reasons for this is that people understand what a fireman does, whereas no one is really sure what a tax accountant does. I have a good friend that was an accountant that moved into IT as he believed it was a more glamorous profession and he thought that it would be easier to meet girls as a computer programmer.
When someone asks what I do, my response is based on the target audience. For example, if someone is in the IT industry I will often introduce myself as a DBA, whereas for other people I will introduce myself as an IT consultant or just a consultant if I think they will ask me to fix their printer. One of the problems about being a DBA is that just like a tax account people do not know what it is we do. When you introduce yourself to a stranger and they ask what you do, how do you respond?
- Peter Ward
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Just over a year ago I attended a lavish presentation to mark the release of version 1.0 of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server (PPS). PerformancePoint was released in November 2007 to fill a gap in the Business Intelligence stack by incorporating monitoring, analysis, and planning into a single application. One of the big selling points to justify the $20,000 price tag for the sever component was that PerformancePoint included forecasting that allowed Microsoft to compete with other vendors in the planning space. Just 12 months after the release, PPS has been discontinued as an independent product. It appears that the planning component of PPS is being abandoned just like Microsoft Songsmith. Although score carding will be integrated into SharePoint there has been no official mention of where the budget and forecasting features will end up, although the rumours appear to be that they will end up in the Dynamics product line. So does the fact that Microsoft no longer has a budgeting and forecasting solution really matter?
- Peter Ward
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I remember shoe shopping with my grandfather when I was young. It was almost a ritualistic experience that would occur at the start of spring each year. He would visit the same shoe shop and buy the same pair of shoes every year. He was very thrifty with his money and refused to spend a cent unless he needed to. The shoes that he would buy were one of the most expensive in the shop at almost $450 a pair. When I quizzed him one year about the cost he explained that once you have found something comfortable stick with it. He went on to explain further that he spent 8 hours on his feet working everyday and that he worked six days a week. So over the course of the year he spent 2496 hours on his feet. He followed this up by justifying the cost and asked me 'so do you think spending $0.18 per hour too much to pay for a pair of shoes that means I still have energy when my shift is finished and I go home?'
As someone who spends a great deal of time behind a computer it is not shoes that are important to me but the chair that I sit in. Many people suffer from back pain and even work related injuries such as muscle spasm, simply because they are sitting in an office chair that does not provide sufficient support or is not designed for their body shape. Personally, I have found that the Aeron chair is one of the most comfortable chairs on the market. However, at $1,500 per chair many companies see this as excessive and a waste of money. But when you break it down like my grandfather did, is $0.78 per hour too much to spend on a chair?
- Peter Ward
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The 26th of January is Australia Day and it is a day of celebration to commemorate the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia. Typically, most Australians celebrate the day as a public holiday and use it as an opportunity for a BBQ and a few beers with friends. I was chatting with the husband of one of my wife's friends today who is an avid Mercedes Benz fan. In fact, he has upgraded his car to the latest model every four years for the past 12 years. On average Mercedes launches a new version of their coupe sports every four year; however, this year they have released a new model only two years since the last model hit the showroom floor. However, for the first time he will not be driving the latest model as his upgrade was based on a roadmap that has all of a sudden been changed.
If this sounds familiar it is exactly what Microsoft are doing with the release of Kilimanjaro. There were five years between SQL Server 2000 and 2005 and then only three years between SQL Server 2005 and 2008. All of a sudden though there will only be about 18 months between SQL Server 2008 and Kilimanjaro. As with a Mercedes Benz, a DBMS is not something that you upgrade every two years. Do you think that the release of Kilimanjaro is too soon considering that approximately 30% of the SQL Server installations are still on SQL Server 2000?
- Peter Ward
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The inauguration of Barak Obama earlier in the week was the world's largest media event ever. The media coverage of the inauguration was not limited to traditional articles on Web sites and included all sorts of new media including high-definition live streaming of the event. Often at large events such as sporting events there are a large number of people trying to use their mobile phones, which causes the network to be saturated due to a lack of capacity. Due to the consumption of high-definition content the 'pipes' of the Internet were in a very similar situation due to the huge spike in data consumption. If we think of where the Internet originated from, it was a text-based platform used by several hundred people but has changed to a multimedia platform used by billons of people. Fundamentally, though, the underlying Internet technology has not changed since the first packet was sent across the wire. Is the performance of the Internet during the inauguration of Obama a sign that the capacity of the Internet is nearing saturation?
- Peter Ward
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SharePoint is one of the fastest selling Microsoft server technologies. Since launching the product in 2001, Microsoft has sold over100 million licences of the product. The product has continued to achieve a compound growth rate in license sales of about 15% over the past two years. At the QLD SQL Server User Group tonight the presentation was on integrating Reporting Services in SharePoint and the session was packed to the rafters. From the feedback in the presentation it appears that many organisations have deployed SharePoint but are still struggling to achieve business value from the product.
I read an article recently that described SharePoint as a virus due to the way that it is spreading throughout the enterprise. SharePoint is often deployed as a collaboration tool and people then start to look at how they leverage some of the other features. One of the first things that most companies want to do with SharePoint once the list of birthdays for all staff members have been entered is to integrate a BI Solution. The problem I see with this is that SharePoint is just one more technology that a DBA needs to learn.
- Peter Ward
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Do you work in an IT department that you think is a great environment? InfoWorld recently released an article titled Top 10 qualities of a great IT shop and it got me thinking about what really makes a good IT department great. This particular article focuses more on the processes and benefits such as the latest technology and software. However, I think if you talk to an employee I am sure they will have a very different view of what they look for. Is it catered lunches, flexible work hours, or dual monitors that you look for in a workplace? If you work in a great IT department I would love to know what you think makes it great.
- Peter Ward
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Two friends of mine have been without Internet access for the past few days. One has been without Internet access due to an issue with their service provider and the other was starved of the 'information superhighway' as a result of moving house. I was having a chat with both of them today and it is amazing how in just over 10 years this technology has found its way into everyday activities from finding out what is on the television to working out how to convert pounds to kilograms. Although the Internet has become a key part of our day-to-day life I think it is even more entrenched in our professional lives.
Think about the last time you came across an error in the SQL Server error log that you had not seen before and how you worked out what the issue was. More than likely part of the process was to use your search engine of choice to look for the error or perhaps you used a messaging client to ping a colleague about the problem. So would you be able to solve a problem if it wasn't for the Internet or are you simply reliant on someone else solving the problem for you?
- Peter Ward
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In any industry there are job titles that really do not seem to fit the role. For example, there is a Garboligist who is a person that empties waste and a Director of First Impressions who is a receptionist. There seems to be a trend where companies are compensating employees with bigger job titles. Over the last 10 years the term architect has started to appear in more and more job titles. I think Bill Gates popularised the term when he changed his job title to Chief Technical Architect.
So what really is an architect? If you were to ask most people what an architect is, they would respond with, "An architect is someone that is licensed to lead a design team in the planning and design of buildings". However, the word architect derives from a Greek word that means in its broadest sense a person who translates a user's requirements into a built environment. So although architect appears as a jacked-up job title it describes the key role of providing a formal description of a system. So what strange job titles exist in your company?
- Peter Ward
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There are a number of debates in IT that people are very passionate and one sided about. When you talk about SQL Server one of the perennial debates surrounds the capitalisation of keywords in TSQL scripts. Although this debate has far from disappeared, it seems to be overshadowed by the current debate of whether to virtualize SQL Server or not. There are those that refuse point blank to virtualize and then those on the other side of the fence, with very little middle ground.
I think virtualisation is like any other server installation—it can be done right or it can be done wrong. The problem is that when it goes wrong performance is often severely affected. One of the biggest problems with virtualization I see is that the decision to virtualize is based on the key driver of consolidation. As a result, people try to maximise their investment by squeezing too many server instances into the hardware footprint. Just like any sever install, if the hardware is not sized or configured appropriately, performance will decrease as a result. So on which side of the fence do you sit in the Virtualisation Debate?
- Peter Ward
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I caught up with a friend last night who works in the financial services industry. Due to the current credit situation the company he works for is in a position where they have been forced to reduce their gearing. The company currently has two properties on the market which were valued mid-last year at over two billion dollars; however, they have not been able to sell them even with an asking price of only 1.2 billion dollars. As a result, 100 of their staff were laid off yesterday in order to try and reduce costs. My friend although concerned about the future of his own job as an in-house developer asked what the future meant for DBAs.
To be perfectly honest I don't know the answer to this question; however, my crystal ball tells me that the future is very bright. Although a lot of people are talking about doom and gloom I think that the downturn will mean an increase of work. One of the key reasons is that companies with a strong balance sheet will be looking to acquire companies under financial stress and someone needs to do the data migration. I have noticed over the past two weeks that the number of jobs for data conversion and migration roles has increased significantly. Are you seeing any trends in the DBA market that defy the negativity of the popular press?
- Peter Ward
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I once read a story about a Senior Manager at Toyota who would often pay a surprise visit to the numerous car manufacturing plants around the world and force all the senior management team from their offices onto the production floor. He would use this opportunity to find somewhere from where the operations of the plant could be observed and draw a chalk circle on the floor. He would then have the senior management team stand in this location for half a day. This activity was designed to take the management team out of their offices onto the plant floor to see what was really happening. It was a strategy that was designed to identify and resolve the problems identified whilst standing in the circle.
As a consultant I often get an opportunity to talk face to face with people who are experiencing problems and observe the situation. I am frequently amazed at how much people put up with before they complain. They often do not report something unless productivity is severely affected. Often face time is a great way to understand what the impact of a system not performing is on the people that are using it. When was the last time you spent time looking at how the users use the system that you support?
- Peter Ward
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Over the last few years more and more people are starting to work away from the office. Rather than be confined to a cubical, flexibility has become the norm especially with reliable high speed Internet access being available through the use of little more than a laptop and a data card. Although many companies are starting to see the benefits of telecommuting, there are still a large number that like an employee to be working from a cubicle, often for little reason other than to ensure that they are working.
I was listening to a CD today in a colleague's car that was an interview with a CEO of a software development company. This company had a culture where employees would not leave work before their boss and would act busy focusing on meaningless tasks rather than being first out the door. As a result there was a high volume of sick leave as people were burnt out from the long hours even though they weren't doing any work. One of the challenges he faced was breaking down this culture and I was intrigued by how he used the current economic downturn to his advantage. Rather than tackle the cultural issue head-on he used the high-cost of rent for a cube farm as stimulus to encourage remote working. So is there a reason that you don't work remotely in your organisation?
- Peter Ward
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The Sarbanes Oxley Act is a United States federal law that was introduced in 2002 in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals that rocked the financial world. Although this act did restore investor confidence it has done very little to improve corporate governance and transparency. The announcement in the last few days that the company profits for Satyam, one of India's largest outsourcing companies has been overstated over recent years highlights this. Despite the fact that Satyam is listed on the NASDAQ, this fraud went undetected by the company auditors. The financials for any company that is listed on the NASDAQ needs to meet the US GAAP Standards and comply with SOX requirements. So is SOX in its current form enough to prevent future corporate scandals?
- Peter Ward
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Many organizations are looking for cost saving measures in the current economic crisis and one of the ways to save money is by reducing staff head count. Microsoft is not immune to the current crisis and based on the comments on the Mini-Microsoft blog, Microsoft appears to be in the middle of what is being termed a Reduction in Force. Despite this, they are not referring this to layoffs despite the rumors that there are no new hires, that staff is not being replaced, and that contractors are being reduced in many teams.
It is to be expected in the current economic climate that companies are looking at how they can improve efficiency by doing 'more with less', however it appears that entire product divisions are disappearing. What is interesting is that there are reports that there are cutbacks occurring in the SQL Server team. The release date of in the first half of 2010 for the SQL Server release code-named "Kilimanjaro" seemed to be very aggressive and I wonder what these staff cutbacks will mean for the ship date and included functionality?
- Peter Ward
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