The (slightly tongue in cheek) role of the database administrator
As a former DBA, I find a disturbing trend toward a value proposition that is almost nonexistent among a recent crop of database administrators. Maybe having some background and/or working with other stellar DBAs in the past has spoiled me, but here's the workflow I've find more and more common. scenario - production application has slowed down for a few transaction types, dynatrace shows a critical sql statement has slowed down. None of the development team has access to run explains, we can't "afford" hardware to load the production dataset into another environment (because we're using a DBMS that costs 13.6 bajillion dollars per CPU nanosecond with an additional upcharge of 1 million pounds sterling every time we execute a query that uses DML... Explains indicate everything is optimal in the lower environments. The decision to use this particular platform after the salesman for the product took the DBA team to Vegas for a "conference" and