Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

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I always had to fight with corporate DBAs to add indexes - they never wanted to create them because it made their backups take longer so instead they made everyday usage slower for everyone.

One poor woman I worked with used to come in every day and kick off a bunch of queries that would do a couple linear scan of a database and take four-six hours to complete. I added a single one column index and the same query ran in less then a second. Got a hug on the spot. The DBA was upset the backup took a couple minutes longer to complete but when he complained he got into trouble for not profiling the queries and adding the index himself (ha!).

After that I started using SQLite for a lot of things - instead of confronting the DBAs I’d just dump the official database into an SQLite database and run all my queries against that. Was kind of amazing that you would have these huge Oracle clusters supporting a database with a few tens or hundreds of megabytes (not even gigabytes) of data but perfect size for slurping into SQLite on my desktop.

What you were dealing with is most likely a sysadmin that grew into a role of DBA. The DBAs I know are highly qualified and are actually making operations so much more smoother. They help with strategies of effective schema migrations, know the profiler in-depth, and actually detect optimization opportunities before the devs realize it.

My guess is that you were dealing with a person who may not actually enjoy their work and is optimizing to make their work as little as possible — but of course I may be way off course here. :)

You may be right, now that I think it there was one guy responsible for all the databases in my business line, and he was the one always launching a two ocean war when his backup ran a minute slower then the day before.

Which is just petty stuff, and sends the message “I am more important than the rest of the company”.

It sounds like he doesn’t have the organization’s best interests in mind, but rather just his own.

Just goes to show you that just because somebody managed to get a job with the title DBA doesn't mean they're actually an expert in database management.

Pardon my french, but I would call such DBA an "anti-DBA"

That's not french at all. :)

administrateur bâtard de l'enfer

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