Today I am catching up on my backlog of reader response emails for various topics.
Mark – Traits of a Good Software Developer
I think your point about passion is key. One note I might add to your thoughts is how to encourage passion in a development team. Even if a team is given freedom of scope for “passionate” work, as a freelance consultant to many development teams, I have more often than not seen a few seasoned players work with passion, but often at the expense of micromanaging the more junior personnel. I believe that the only way to motivate the best out of a team is to give enough freedom to ALL members of the team to explore and take ownership of their work for themselves.
Of course, project constraints do not always give this liberty, particularly when working with junior staff. However, if a junior member of the team exhibits the character qualities the Forbe’s article mentioned (i.e. strong work ethic, integrity), I think it is important for a manager to look for ways to entrust the junior member with tasks/modules they can put their stamp on…it is sometimes surprising what comes out of such a move.
What’s better than one staff member working passionately and enjoying what they do…an entire team that flows together in harmony. This has been a rarity in my meagre 20 year career in IT, but when I have had the privilege to work with such teams, it has always been immensely rewarding for all involved…including the client.
Maurice – Tally To the Rescue
Maurice shares a simple query for creating a large amoutn of tally sequence data quickly.
Create function dbo.GetNums(@n as BigInt) —
returns TABLE
as
Return
(
With
L0 AS (select 1 as c union all Select 1 )
, L1 as (select 1 as C From L0 A Cross JOIN L0 B )
, L2 as (select 1 as C From L1 A Cross JOIN L1 B )
, L3 as (select 1 as C From L2 A Cross JOIN L2 B )
, L4 as (select 1 as C From L3 A Cross JOIN L3 B )
, L5 as (select 1 as C From L4 A Cross JOIN L4 B )
, nums as (Select ROW_NUMBER() OVER (Order by C) as nb from L5)
Select nb From Nums where nb < @n
)
go
select * from Dbo.GetNums(1000)
Dilip sends a response to DBA – Beyond Relational
Here, is what I have seen in last 30 years.
1. We keep on calling Role as DBA. But, it was never so; for small and medium size
organizations.
2. The Role was a combination of Operating System and related software installer,
OS Administrator/Domain Administrator, Network Administrator and Database
Administrator – all in One. This situation is always going to be there.
3. You rightly pointed out that there are many out-of-box helper solutions available
with Powerful and established SQL Servers such as MSSQL, ORACLE, DB2,
Sybase. But, the intense knowledge of data that a DBA acquires over a period of time
for his organization can not be substituted by outsourcing to third party.
4. While designing new systems, we have been immensely benefited by the working
knowledge of our truly great DBAs, who made such valuable suggestions in our
database architecture that performance issues, issues of growing space needs,
disaster recovery could be managed through our software interfaces only.
5. I specifically remember a case when the DBA suggested that we do a certain amount
of De-normalization for some tables which would give us tremendous boost in performance.
6. The database such as Mongo etc. are fast upcoming and will also become established servers
some day and we must learn them but the Role of DBA in a relational database environment
is not going to disappear.
Thanks for the input. Sorry it has take so long to get it posted.
Cheers,
Ben