You know I’ve just invented this device – its round, has a small hole in the middle and works really well if you put two of them together connected by a pole. I’ll call it the wheel – what’s that? Someone’s already thought of it!!
How many times do we reinvent the same solution to a problem? How many times do we not communicate that we have developed a solution? How many times are solutions not shared?
If you were to sit down and work out the cost of the effort wasted in poor management of the tools developed and the procedures implemented in the management of an organisation’s database estate, the chances are you would be pretty concerned about the impact on your operational budget.
DBAs are more often than not pretty smart members of staff, yes they have their idiosyncrasies, but let’s face it so do we all. One aspect that they excel at is making their lives more bearable by automating the processes they perform on a daily basis through the development of tools and workarounds such as stored procedures. Unfortunately, things like stored procedures, which can dramatically improve the lot of an individual, too often remain the domain of that individual. They are not subject to general distribution through a team, nor to the control and quality audit that would be imposed on any other software development. They work, they do the job for that person, nobody needs to really pay too much attention and if the tool wasn’t there they would do the same thing manually so why does it matter? When the DBA moves on his tools and developments are often discarded, left dormant in a library and the knowledge leaves with him/her. Another DBA is hired and off he/she goes to develop their sole version of the same tools, and so the process repeats itself.
This is not decrying the development of tools by the individual but surely there is a better way? Managing the developments of the team in a controlled environment, creating a shared library of tools and a development standard and using existing effort to build and move forward.
A significant number of readers of this post will say “yes we do that already”, but there will be more who experience exactly this problem.
Jumbo IT Services has a tool for managing this ad hoc and necessity led development environment that is easy to use and provides the safeguards you would expect, creates a shared environment and ensures that the intellectual property developed in the company’s time remains with the company. It even has a built-in change control system to help ease worries over people altering things on the fly and forgetting to return them to the original.
If you’d like to know how it’s done then send me a message, if you think I’m bleating on about an irrelevance then please make a comment.
How many times do we reinvent the same solution to a problem? How many times do we not communicate that we have developed a solution? How many times are solutions not shared?
If you were to sit down and work out the cost of the effort wasted in poor management of the tools developed and the procedures implemented in the management of an organisation’s database estate, the chances are you would be pretty concerned about the impact on your operational budget.
DBAs are more often than not pretty smart members of staff, yes they have their idiosyncrasies, but let’s face it so do we all. One aspect that they excel at is making their lives more bearable by automating the processes they perform on a daily basis through the development of tools and workarounds such as stored procedures. Unfortunately, things like stored procedures, which can dramatically improve the lot of an individual, too often remain the domain of that individual. They are not subject to general distribution through a team, nor to the control and quality audit that would be imposed on any other software development. They work, they do the job for that person, nobody needs to really pay too much attention and if the tool wasn’t there they would do the same thing manually so why does it matter? When the DBA moves on his tools and developments are often discarded, left dormant in a library and the knowledge leaves with him/her. Another DBA is hired and off he/she goes to develop their sole version of the same tools, and so the process repeats itself.
This is not decrying the development of tools by the individual but surely there is a better way? Managing the developments of the team in a controlled environment, creating a shared library of tools and a development standard and using existing effort to build and move forward.
A significant number of readers of this post will say “yes we do that already”, but there will be more who experience exactly this problem.
Jumbo IT Services has a tool for managing this ad hoc and necessity led development environment that is easy to use and provides the safeguards you would expect, creates a shared environment and ensures that the intellectual property developed in the company’s time remains with the company. It even has a built-in change control system to help ease worries over people altering things on the fly and forgetting to return them to the original.
If you’d like to know how it’s done then send me a message, if you think I’m bleating on about an irrelevance then please make a comment.
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