The Database Superbowl

What if there were a Superbowl for Oracle database professionals?  Who would referee?  Who would play?  Who would sponsor?  What sort of tomfoolery would ensue?

Here’s my Oracle database Superbowl scenario …

Teams
DBAs vs. sys admins

Referees
Tom Kyte
Cary Millsap
Arup Nanda
Tanel Poder

Sponsors
Microsoft – which would fill their ad space SQL Server propaganda

Austrian Red Bull GmbH – the maker of Red Bull.  Their tag line could be, “Red Bull, keeping system administrators awake since 1995.”

PepsiCo – the maker of Mountain Dew

H&R Block – which wants in on the financial planning business for all those rich DBAs

Location
An expanse of artificial turf spread out over the frozen pond at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.  Larry Ellison graciously donates $5.4 million dollars for cooling equipment to freeze the pond, since it never would have frozen by itself in California.  Oracle Corporation springs for rental bleachers on each side of the shoreline.

Pre-game rally
The DBAs hide in the locker room and play cards during the rally, claiming to be working a critical database issue.  The sys admins attend the rally, but are late and don’t pay any attention, as they are too fixated with the possibility of installing Ubuntu on an electric pencil sharpener they just found.

The audience
The two teams burst from their starting gates through the paper tape barrier made from some Oracle7 documentation, to find a roaring crowd of network administrators, developers, and Oracle employees.

Larry Ellison has been given complimentary 50 yard line front row seats, unlimited beer and ice cream sandwiches, and a laminated listing of the remaining few small-to-medium sized tech companies that Oracle has not yet acquired.  He has a grease pen with which he may circle the companies he’d like to order during the game, and the hot dog vendor will negotiate the sale during half time.

Fouls, penalties, and skullduggery
The sys admins deallocate most the database server’s memory so they can allocate it to their secret World of Warcraft game server.  Referee Arup Nanda calls a “tripping by member of either team” penalty on the sys admin team.  The sys admin offensive coach stifles a smile.

The DBAs watch the sys admins’ fingers as they type the root password, which is cleverly set to “root,” and borrow it to reallocate the stolen memory, plus some extra for good measure, from the game server back to the database server.  Referee Tanel Poder is genuinely amused by this play, but being bound to adhere to the game rules, calls an illegal motion penalty against the DBAs.  The DBA coach doesn’t even bother to stifle his smile.

Cary Millsap, MacBook neatly tucked under his arm, calls an illegal low block penalty on the DBA team for a failed attempt to tune a database with a UTLESTAT/UTLBSTAT report.  Cary doesn’t really think this poor behavior actually constitutes an illegal low block, but he likes that it sounds like “row lock.”

Tom Kyte, smiling wryly like Tom Kyte does, assesses an unnecessary roughness penalty on the DBA quarterback who is attempting to insert ten additional rows into dual.  The DBA head coach protests, claiming a My Oracle Support article said adding rows into dual provides an excellent performance boost.  The coach is unable to prove his claim, as the My Oracle Support site is currently down.  The penalty stands.

Arup Nanda, blowing his whistle and wildly waving an Oracle magazine cover that he’s colored yellow with a Sharpie marker, calls a penalty against the DBA wide receiver for gratuitous partitioning.

Other goings-on
Tanel Poder, out of boredom with the game (civilized people watch the real football: soccer!), pipes derogatory comments about American football directly into the memory space allocated to the football stats database SGA, crashing the underlying server.  The other referees put him in a specially designed penalty box fitted with an electronic security lock.  Tanel proceeds to defeat the lock by finding a vulnerability in its Oracle Enterprise Linux operating system.  He then lures a sys admin into the box, promising to tell him about the vulnerability, then quickly slams the door shut, leaving the sys admin team one man short.  Tanel then sneaks up to the stadium bar to drink European beer and watch soccer on the big screen.

Larry Ellison, feeling festive after a couple of free pilsners, pencils in “IBM” to the “to buy” company listing and hands his order to the hot dog vendor, who shrieks in horror.  Both are hog-tied and carried out of the park by a pack of burly European anti-monopoly regulators.