I was visiting a client the other day who had a very large IT infrastructure including a major SQL Server investment. The DBAs and I spent a lot of time talking about where they were experiencing pain and long hours.
One common theme that these customers, and others across the country, have shared with me is the rather low level of skills that they're encountering from the application developers they support. Here are a couple examples:
One developer turned in a change request to alter some tables on a SQL Server 2000 database such that the row length would come in at 16,000 bytes. The DBA responded that this change request would go through since the maximum row length for a SQL Server 2000 record was approximately 8050 bytes. The application developer replied "What are bytes and why should I care?"
Another developer asked a DBA to roll out a new web application. The DBA, who had an initial degree of trust in his developers, said "Sure, but you might want to give these stored procedures over here another smoke test. They don't look right." The application developer said, "Why would I want to test? That'd just slow things down."
I think it's examples like these that have we DBAs shaking in our boots when CLR finally hits the streets. Who knows what those crazy application developers might deploy!?!
I'd like to hear more crazy and stupid developer tricks. Please send them to me at [email protected] with the subject "developer tricks". I'll share the best one(s) with you in the future and the lucky soul(s) will get a free copy of my latest book "SQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition". (Check the book out at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565927443/ref=sc_b_6/102-6419463-0201736.)
Thanks!
-Kev
