Have You Seen the Special Edition SelectViews Shows?
Security, SSIS, Reporting Services… all available now – watch here – and a new show will post Friday this week as well.
Looking for Free SQL Server Tools?
If you’re looking to get a leg up on backup, SQL Server permissions or even SQL Server monitoring, and think a great free tool to do that work for you would be the answer, be sure to head over to Idera’s Free Tools site. They have these available for download so you’ll be able have solid tools available for working with your servers. These are not trials, these are great to put to work on your systems. Check it out here!
OfficeTV Show Posted
Looking for the latest on your use of Office applications? Check out this week’s OfficeTV show on our sister site. It’s a quick show that includes tips, tricks and industry news.
> Watch Here
Responsible Data Management and Uses
I’ve had the recent unfortunate experience of dealing with "delayed" (HA! LOST) luggage. Coming back from Florida to Arizona, two of our bags went missing. You’d think with all those bar codes and the tracking involved with our baggage, it’d be an easy thing to say "Look, we flew Orlando to Atlanta to Tucson – it simply has to be in one of those places, just look at the scan logs and you’ll find it, right?" Not so fast. It turns out that your luggage is scanned on the way in (when you drop it off) and when it’s taken off the plane at the final destination. That’s right – in between – you know, where it’s most likely to be in transit and "at risk" – it’s not scanned or tracked.
Aside from being more infuriating than I have space to explain here, it got me thinking. Don’t we have a responsibility to use data to its fullest? To use opportunities to provide real information and see that it’s available to solve problems? "Problems" might be reporting, forecasting, tracking or whatever, but isn’t there a responsibility, somewhere in that org chart, to work with data, make sure it’s thought out and used to its fullest?
Maybe I’m living in a dream world, but it would seem that this would be a "take a step back and think for a moment" during the design of an application, and then later, when you find out how the application is really used.
How silly to not store information about a bag as it moves around. Think of the millions of dollars to be saved by being able to know where to look to find those bags. I’ve read that as many as 10,000 (!) bags are lost daily. 10,000! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you could really make a lot of customers happy, save lots of aggravation and make a real bottom-line cost savings difference by simply using the systems to their fullest. Heck, in this case at least, you don’t even have to keep the data around once the bag scans at the other end.
All this to say a couple of things. Shame on you airline industry for not better systematizing things. Someone, somewhere is deciding it’s not worth the work. Not worth making it better. Boo-hiss… to say the least.
But the more important thought here (at least in the context of this newsletter) is that every now and then, it’s a DBA’s place to consider how the information is really used. What else could/should be done with it? Make the recommendation. Forget the "DBA Roles" and step up and show how things can be better. The same is true for the application developers, the designers, etc. If you’re touching an application, think about it sometimes – how could it be better set up.
Each time I spoke with a representative about our issue, I heard how deficient the system was in actually locating a bag. So, everyone has ideas, but no one is doing anything about it…
Ugh.
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