DBAs, like many other IT professionals, often take instruction in how to do their job from people who have no recent experience in their profession. How has this come about? Such is the huge task of assimilating and ordering facts about any new technology that the people who publish books and articles, or who give advice on best-practices, are predominantly trainers, professional communicators and technical authors by trade.

Does this matter? Should we worry? Yes, because it means we are missing out on advice honed in the imperfect, real world of work. The real initiation for the job of DBA, developer or SysAdmin comes from studying stories of heroic failure as much as stunning success, of imperfect solutions wrought from the tools at hand, and with minimal budget. They aren't always pretty. In the real world, best practices are abused, unfashionable technologies are used, and SQL Server features are bent alarmingly out of shape to fit the need. But these are all working solutions, tested and accepted by demanding users.

The vast bulk of the training materials currently provided for IT professionals give exaggerated weight to life-changing new product-features, intimate knowledge about the bowels of the server software and unrealistic best practices. It is an intimidating tsunami of information and opinion; so daunting that the average DBA and developer often feels reticent about contributing to the pool of community knowledge. Are their more mundane, workaday tales of SQL Server survival actually what people need to hear more about?

For me, the recent SQL Saturday event in Pensacola, was a breath of fresh air. Here were presentations that rang true, and which seemed immediately relevant. This was the voice of the hardened practitioner, not the slick presenter. Shawn McGehee, Ryan Duclos, Rodney Landrum, Don Demsak, Nathan Heaivilin and all of the other day-to-day DBAs and developers were prepared to put their head above the parapet in the hope that what they had learned the hard way could help others. It did.

Is it possible to redress the balance, and to give a greater weight to the sage advice of the graduates of the school of hard knocks and the University of Life? Can we give the real practitioners a greater confidence to make their voices heard? Events such as SQL Saturday certainly help and we hope that we can do our bit too. As an example, Red Gate is running the Exceptional DBA event again this year. An exceptional DBA doesn't necessarily mean one who always follows database best practices or can tell you more about the internals of SQL Server than you ever cared to know; it just needs to be someone who will go to exceptional lengths to provide their users and developers with what they need to do their jobs. If you're an end user, developer or manager who works with this sort of DBA, we encourage you to nominate them for their well-earned 15 minutes of fame.

Cheers,

Tony.