Ha, so much for curing my laziness! Anyway …
Not long after I first started working with computers, I would regularly be involved in discussions about whether programming was an art or not. At the time I was working for a games company, writing ZX Spectrum games in Z80 Assembly Language and there was little doubt in the mind of most colleagues that what we were doing was artistic.Surely writing code was like writing short stories? Each programmer would have their own particular style and there was always the challenge to write something more elegantly, more simply or more efficiently than you had before. But I think I always struggled with the idea of programming as an art because there were strict limitations on what would and wouldn’t work. A piece of code that crashes is a fundamentally useless thing.
A few years ago I found myself having a similar conversation with a couple of Java developers I know, but this time the focus was Engineering. One had started his working life as an engineer and thought our approach to programming was laughable. Why does everyone have different development approaches when we should be able to able to design and develop software based on the lessons of the past? I suppose that’s where patterns come into play.
In both cases, my position was that programming was a craft. Yes, it has an artistic component in as much as creativity can be applied to come up with a solution that might be considered more beautiful than others, but the solution has to perform it’s function. So (and I’m sorry to disappoint them), I’d say that most software developers are more akin to a carpenter than a sculptor. First the table has to work as a table, then it might be beautiful.So what the hell has all of this got to do with anything?
Well I’m a little disappointed by the tone of some of the debate in Oracle-land recently and the constant under-current seems to be either you use a scientific approach to everything (in which case you’re a good DBA) or you don’t (in which case you’re not). I think I know where the scientists are coming from, because I’m often tired when I read some of the self-serving ‘experts’ (whose main area of expertise seems to be self-promotion) make statements which are demonstrably untrue. I’ve attended many of their presentations and come away either shaking my head in disagreement or just plain bored because all I got was what was in the manual. They also don’t help themselves by writing books with positively glowing, self-written biographies. Actually, I’d better stop because those people drive me nuts.
What I’m more concerned with is this absolute insistence on science to the detriment of other attributes or approaches. I was watching an interesting documentary about the way the human brain works the other day and a lead fireman was being interviewed. He’d ordered his team to evacuate a building purely on a strange instinct, seconds before a massive backdraft trashed the place. The program looked at how previous stored experiences can help us recognise similar situations without neccessarily having justifiable evidence. To be honest, there’s loads more interesting stuff in this vein in one of my all-time favourite books, The User Illusion.
Let’s face it, if everything we did as Oracle DBAs had to be established for the first time by us conducting an experiment, we’d never get any bl**dy work done! Don’t get me wrong, though … if I need to show someone how something works or find out for myself, nothing beats a good working example. I just don’t always need to be a scientist. So here are a few opinions before I shut up
1) Mr. Don Burleson, you talk rubbish. I have a very basic high school education but left pretty quickly to play around with computers and taught myself. I’ve lost count of the number of degree-educated colleagues who I wouldn’t allow near a database. This is a craft, so I’ll be judged by the quality of my work and not pieces of unrelated paper. I’m surprised you didn’t check out my qualifications before including someone elses comments on my work on your website. People need to be careful getting their information on the web – the author might not have a degree!
2) The Oak Table Network. I had high hopes in the past, but when I was at the recent UK OUG conference I attended a couple of Q&As and the like and the participants sounded as self-serving and unscientific of opinion as the people they profess to challenge. I’d like to specifically exclude Jonathan Lewis from this criticism. If there’s a true Oracle scientist I’ve come across, he’s it, and Cary Millsap too.
3) Oh dear … then I buy Cary’s Optimizing Oracle Performance book and I was really excited about that. Loved loads of the content too but there is absolutely no chance I’ll ever read it all because I found it too hard to get past page after page of ‘you’ve been doing it wrong all these years, here’s how to do it right’. Then telling me how to do what I’ve known for some time. It’s this setting up of knowledge as some kind of rare genius that used to put me off a lot of Oracle professionals. When I read the introduction to this book, I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be about Oracle Performance or explain how to solve world famine. The problem is that everyone seems to be at it now!
4) And have you ever read any of those Oracle Press TUSC books? Unbelievable! I’m planning on declaring myself the world’s foremost expert on SQL*Plus at some point in the future just so I can get my name on the cover of a book.I’m tired of these bun-fights and people disappearing up their own posteriors. Lest I seem entirely negative, here’s a list of people I have genuine admiration for :-
Tom Kyte (obviously) – but look how often his answers include some sort of previous experience, hunch or opinion in *addition* to worked examples and experiments.
Carl Dudley – but you’ll never hear of him because he’s not pompous enough to push his own case.
Jonathan Lewis – but until I’d met him, I found some of his postings a bit harsh. Turns out he was a nice guy, a mathematician and has put in a power of work on behalf of Oracle users. But then I think he’s going soft in his old age 😉
Peter Robson – takes his subject very seriously, always inquisitive. Again, just not self-serving enough.
Cary Millsap – although that book tested my loyalties. Worth inclusion here purely for the OFA paper, which I used to stroke lovingly when I first found it. A work of complete craft!
And a whole bunch of other DBAs, including some of the people I work with at Sun Microsystems at the moment, instructors I’ve taught with etc.. etc.. Tell you what guys … even as someone who likes to give the odd presentation and course myself, maybe we shouldn’t confuse the ability to talk loudly with the ability to build and maintain solid database applications. What do you think?
Oh, did I mention? I think being an Oracle DBA is a craft that needs a little bit of science, a rigorous approach, some experience and perhaps even a little bit of humility, not that you’d notice!Well, that seems to have unblocked the laziness a bit anyway!If you’re actually quite keen on a bun-fight, here’s a couple of essential web-links
http://www.dizwell.com/2005/01/new-year-old-oak-table.html
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:35336203098853