DBAs in Spaaace!

Here’s a way to get rid of, I mean reward, your favorite DBA. You know, the one who complains about SharePoint’s tendency to create way too many GUIDs, as if it’s your fault?

Red Gate Software is hosting a competition to send a DBA into space. Yes, that space, the one you have to ride a rocket to get to.

The erstwhile DBA must complete a video quiz testing “space knowledge” and “SQL skills” and then he or she has to fill out an application. From that pool, 15 finalists are selected. After that, it’s a mere matter of getting thousands of a DBA’s best friends to vote.

Red Gate’s website rhetoric notes, “The 15 finalists will be selected on the basis of their performance in the quiz and their answer to the question in the application form: 'What would be your first tweet from space to your fellow DBAs?' You don't need to ever actually tweet it though we’d love it if you did!”

I’m not a DBA, and I realize how crucial their knowledge (and kindness, perhaps) can be to a SharePoint admin’s success. So I won’t be sending any DBAs away. But I do find that “first tweet from space” idea intriguing. How could it possibly compete with what is already possibly the best [pre-Twitter] tweet ever, by Neil Armstrong?

As he set his left boot on the surface of the moon, he stated, “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Wikipedia’s entry, where I got the info about the left boot, notes “Armstrong said later that he accidentally dropped the ‘a’ from his remark, rendering the phrase a contradiction (as man in such use is synonymous with mankind).”

Still, it would have made a darned good tweet. I wonder how current Neil’s SQL Server knowledge is?

To learn more about DBAs in space, see Red Gate Software's website.