Made up example post:
My SQL Server queries are very slow on my Heap Tables, however due to large quantities of updates a clustered index is not preferable.
An excellent solution to slow SQL Server queries is SQL Ferret. SQL Ferret will root out and consume your problems like a small ro...
Basically asking for downvotes just feels wrong...that's a style of answer I've seen on occasion on UX.SE though, featurelist of a product one may or may not use, often with no explicit relation to the problem at hand
I thing SQL Server is a somewhat warmer and fluffier product than Oracle, but I think 'too easy' is stretching things a bit.
Funnily enough, pretty much all the Oracle people I know who spend any real time working SQL Server tend to be quite impressed with it.
Oracle has some nice features - the system data dictionary on Oracle is really good. SQL Server caught up with 2005 to some extent, but Oracle is pretty good in that respect.
CONNECT BY is easier to use than CTEs for recursive queries
If you work with Python, cx_Oracle is a really good interface library
PL/SQL has its moments as a language. It's better than T-SQL for a lot of stuff, but I do miss the ease of using temp tables on Oracle.
The management tooling in Oracle is fairly good, and integrates with shell scripting really well.
(Powershell is a bit of a johnny-come-lately on Windows, and only works well when you have cmdlet wrappers for the underlying API)
Actually, I've had quite a lot of mileage out of IronPython for scripting .Net APIs
However, with SQL Server you get a free OLAP server, a free reporting tool, a free ETL tool, good front-end tooling, and some of the features of T-SQL run rings around PL/SQL for verious tasks.
I think if I was really after a stiff SLA I would probably go with Unix/Linux and Oracle.
But fundamentally, if you look at most real SLAs they're prepared to accept a 4hr or 24hr D/R period, particularly if they actually know what's really involved in getting 5 9's for real.
Every few weeks another sharp poster asks:
Why are you asking DBAs about source control?
Why are you asking DBAs about performance?
Why are you asking DBAs about database design or data warehousing?
As a regular DBA.SE patron your response might be: "Because all of those topics are welcome on...
Database Administrators and Data Gurus
or
DBAs and Data Gurus
dba.stackexchange.com
Addressing the name scope problem without a jarring change if/when we switch.
(you've seen it already, doh!)
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells that's just what I was thinking :)
webapps.se was going to be called "no installation necessary" or something. Without a large amount of context it's absolutely meaningless
It's not descriptive, it immediately requires explanation (though not as much as the web apps example)
Stackoverflow and Serverfault are exceptions because they came into the world with those names. For a new site an abstract name just makes it hard to know what it's about
At a guess I'd say that it may be more of a brand recognition issue. Maybe we should think in terms of trying to establish a meme along the lines of DBA.SE is not just for DBAs (grumpy or otherwise :)
@BenBrocka I'm inclined to say that short of a serendipitous leap of intuition we're not going to come up with anything that materially improves on the current name.
It might happen.
It sounds like the problem is PR and people in the cheap seats.
I will admit that when I first saw the DBA site I assumed that it was going to be essentially a database branch of SF, so DBA does give a particular first impression.
Which suggests the epistemology is sound and the problem might be one of PR and idiots in the cheap seats nitpicking over the strict definition of the site.
I'm relatively new to DBA.SE, but does anybody think there is a significant problem other than people arguing the toss about what does or doesn't belong here?
I think Databases is an okay name, but DBA maintains a professional and advanced air about it, which is what we seem to want in DBA questions VS Stack Overflow SQL questions
I've been very vocal about changing our name because of repeated problems not with having questions migrated here, but with having people see us as more than a site for traditional RDBMS questions
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells emphasized plenty; that's not a problem for us, is it?
Arguably, if we're just Databases, beginner SQL stuff or even code accessing databases could be considered relevant at first impression, which doesn't, IMO, mesh with what we want for the site
My take is that the way things are going, we are likely to end up as the de-facto home for all database related Qs on the network, except noddy SQL which will stay on SO (and we migrate it there when we get it!)
There is a bit of a fad for them in the blogosphere, but I wonder how many people are actually using them in production outside big .com and bioinformatics firms and odd 3 letter agencies trying to do large scale data mining.
I have to say, RE the "propaganda" campaign; things like that don't work at a broad level. They only work on active users during the campaign, and they only work on those exposed to them
Much more effective is the actual copy of the site, people get their impressions of a site from using the site, not from some blog they don't read because they never heard of it
Such a campaign might quiet some heavy SE users that are confused with the name or disagree, which might in turn cause them to influence less future users, but if the site does not properly suggest what it is, entirely on it's own, that is a problem
@BenBrocka I think that will happen with time, but persistent advertising and co-operation from SO and SF mods to move DB related questions to DBA.SE will help get it off the ground.
@BenBrocka I don't think there's a silver bullet. I think the long term answer is essentially brand recognition - people associating DBA.SE with database questions.
@BenBrocka More associating database questions in general with a site that calls itself 'database administration'. People will work it out in the long run if the site is successful.
And I think it's likely to succeed, at least in principle, as it has key SO and SF mods cooperating in an initiative to shift appropriate questions across here.
If the FAQ is explicit about it, SO and SF mods are buying into the end goals then maybe just making sure the message gets repeated (ads on Stackoverflow, JA/JS blog posts and continually repeating the 'mantra') is about as good as you can get, short of finding a perefect name.
I think any PR work would want to be low-key and persistent.
That's still only helping the brand with those that get the message. Ads and such should drive people to our site but the wording of the site's tagline, FAQ and general enviornment should naturally suggest what the site is about
@BenBrocka again, because Database Administration doesn't mean database design, query writing and tuning, business intelligence, and to most people, it doesn't even mean administration of NoSQL databases because "Database Administrator" is so closely tied to the traditional platforms: Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc.
@NickChammas I think you're right in principle, but I think that the brand recognition for the site might well work itself out over time. There's a saying that goes 'It takes 10 years to make an overnight success.'
@MarkStoreySmith nah still unemployed at the mo, so no travelling for me. Just got to pass the basic dba skills test on the 20th, although I think passing will make it harder to find a suitable job
SO got off the ground quickly because JS and JA had an established readership. Joel on Software had been going for the better part of a decade before they did Stackoverflow.
if the matter was just getting the definition right then we're done: our FAQ and About pages are all set. But obviously that's not enough to get people to see and use the site to the fullest extent defined.
No one knows what a "Data Guru" is, we just made it up. It certainly doesn't suggest "It's DBA with NoSQL too!" to anyone that hasn't already had this explicit conversation
I have a fulltext query which is usually very fast but may time out when it causes a statistics update since statistics updating is very slow on this database. Usually the query "recovers" to normal speed after the statistics have been updated but I have seen a case where the query always times o...
ok, so it seems @Concerned and @Ben think we should give the DBA.SE name time to marinate and be associated with all the stuff that hasn't found a strong home here yet but that is a core part of our scope
@NickChammas Yes, pretty much. Unless we can find a name that does a much better job of branding the site, I think that we're not going to significantly improve on DBA.SE.
Which leaves establishing an appropriate brand image for DBA.SE as the alternative.
@NickChammas Well, we're not alone. We have buy-in from SO and SF mods, and I'm told the SE management have apparently indicated that they will do what they can to help.
I say 'we' loosely - I've really only been significantly been involved for a few days.
For reference, here is the text of @AlexKuznetsov's post on our main site (which was originally posted as an answer to a question and has since been deleted and moved here):
I know this is not an answer, but I do not know where and how I should
share my opinion. This is not the first time w...
Why are constraint and database design not DBA things?
(as for version control I don't even know why that would be moved here)
So, to summarise. 'DBA' has particular connotations to a large proportion of potential readers that may be offputting. We can't think of an appreciably better name.
Lots of people think UX isn't a real thing; rather than rename UX.SE I would rather say that such people are welcome to leave the site solely based on the name
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells exactly; that's the problem summary--DBA means something very limited to a lot of people. Whether or not they are semantically correct is irrelevant. It gives us an image problem.
I see that term used much less often than DBA, and that's still a specialized job. Design still belongs here and not on SO, no matter what term you put after "database" in your job title
a quick survey of opinions from random SO users would probably be most telling of the impressions those users have on the site based on the name and or their experience withi t
For reference, here is the text of @AlexKuznetsov's post on our main site (which was originally posted as an answer to a question and has since been deleted and moved here):
I know this is not an answer, but I do not know where and how I should
share my opinion. This is not the first time w...
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells he said it here on the main site; Jack moved it to meta.dba
Surveys are cheap. It's a matter of if anyone at SO will participate, failing that we would have to set up a survey and run it via the community ads, if that's even an allowed use of them
Surveys are always self selecting. If we distribute it via ads to SO or even all SE sites we can gain a much better cross section of real user's opinions than we're currently getting
Although, by definition, anyone who's done the survey probably has some understanting of the semantic issue, so the results may be really, really skewed.
Yes, but a survey asking about DBA.SE brand recognition is going to sort of raise the issue in the users' minds.
However, I think you might get useful data from it. if you get a lot of responses along the lines of 'I didn't realise that DBA.SE covered B.I. or database design/programming' then you know you do have a significant brand recognition problem.
Whether you could infer that you're OK from the absence of such responses is a different question, though.
I fail to see how a simple survey asking one's impression of the term DBA and what they expect of a site called DBA.stackexchange would have a significant bias one way or the other
@BenBrocka Because you can't just select a random sample of SE site users and poll them. The only ones resonding are volunteers, which kind of implies that they care about it to begin with.
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells that;s always the case until we can forcefully brain wash people into taking surveys, and alter their brains to be free of bias caused by taking the survey
this isn't like the daily mail survey
these are our users; this is a sample of the relevant population
Actually, not quite like that. More like asking a section of people who write letters to the editor of the Daily Mail about their opinions on crime rates.
@BenBrocka Exactly right. You can't force people to take surveys, but you have to try and understand what bias you're going to get in your sample.
Certainly, those are the people we want trolling the site and answering questions, so a survey to raise awareness would probably be a good thing just from the point of getting some publicity.
@BenBrocka what @ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells is saying is that those on SO who choose to respond to the survey may already have an understanding of the semantic issue because they cared enough to respond.
Only if you phrase the question leading "hey, if you hate DBA.SE's name respond here"...phrase a survey for database developers, not for people concerned about DBA.SE's name
"Database Developer? DBA? We'd like your opinions!"
Nothing about that question implies the underlying issue and I find to reason to suppose all devs working in databases on SO have automatic knowledge of this issue
Oh god no, then you ARE implying the survey is about the DBA's site scope
I gtg, but you guys @BenBrocka and @ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells need to summarize this great discussion as answers to the DBA must die thread when you're done here. I think everybody on the site would appreciate it and it may help us solve our image problems.
Does Oracle's Configuration Manager which according to Oracle provides a "40% faster issue resolution", violate HIPAA or require specific configuration in order to comply?
@BenBrocka Mechanics of database version control are very different than for code, so I was very much in favour of seeing that type of question over here
The only way we'll know if this is a real problem is by asking real users; these discussions are great but it's impossible to know what % of users have these misconceptions if we only listen to those vocal enough to say something. If Bill Gates thought a DBA was a badger and 99% of other develope...
I am strongly for tasteful editing to improve the quality of posts on our site, both new and old.
However...
Answer 1
Unmoderated editing is a privilege that comes with the following admonition (emphasis mine):
Try to make the post substantively better when you edit, not just
change a s...
@NickChammas but that post of his is arrogant IMO. We have other leading (read: verbose and blogging) SQL Server luminaries without counting folk like mark, me martin smith erc
@SimonRigharts linked your accounts to SO or SF? 100 bonus
I have a logging function in T-SQl similiar to this:
CREATE PROCEDURE [logging]
@PROCEDURE VARCHAR(50),
@MESSAGE VARCHAR(MAX)
AS
BEGIN
PRINT @MESSAGE
END;
GO
I am able to call it like this:
execute logging N'procedure_i_am_in', N'log_message';
As my stored procedure names are a bit...
Every few weeks another sharp poster asks:
Why are you asking DBAs about source control?
Why are you asking DBAs about performance?
Why are you asking DBAs about database design or data warehousing?
As a regular DBA.SE patron your response might be: "Because all of those topics are welcome on...
Database Administrators and Data Gurus
or
DBAs and Data Gurus
dba.stackexchange.com
Addressing the name scope problem without a jarring change if/when we switch.
Does Oracle's Configuration Manager which according to Oracle provides a "40% faster issue resolution", violate HIPAA or require specific configuration in order to comply?
I have a logging function in T-SQl similiar to this:
CREATE PROCEDURE [logging]
@PROCEDURE VARCHAR(50),
@MESSAGE VARCHAR(MAX)
AS
BEGIN
PRINT @MESSAGE
END;
GO
I am able to call it like this:
execute logging N'procedure_i_am_in', N'log_message';
As my stored procedure names are a bit...
