… McNeely Musings

Here’s your holiday database song – sing it to the tune of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer:”

Chorus:

The disk drive got run over by a reindeer
While we were running backups Christmas Eve
You can say there’s no such thing as RAID-10
But as for me and the SAN admin, we believe

We’d been drinkin’ too much eggnog
And we should have locked the cage
But we’d propped it open with a brick
And then we got distracted by a page

When they found the disk drive Christmas mornin’
At the scene of the attack
There were hoof prints on its spindles
And the DBA had gotten lots of flack

Chorus

Now we’re all so proud of the SAN admin
He’s been takin’ this so well
See him in there at the console
Drinkin’ beer and swappin’ over to the spare

It’s not Christmas without the disk drive
All the department’s dressed in black
And we just can’t help but wonder
Should we repair the disk or send it back?

Chorus

Now the RAID stripes are reassembled
And we all took one last swig
And the cage is now locked tight
The sys admins put Santa in the brig

I’ve warned all my IT colleagues
Better watch out for yourselves
They should never loan their card key
To a man who drives a sleigh and plays with elves

Chorus

by Mary Elizabeth McNeely

I went to Hotsos Symposium 2014, in Irving, Texas, last week. If you’re an Oracle technologist and you’re not going to the Symposium each year, you’re really missing out. Not only is it a chance to see some excellent presentations, it’s also a chance to interact with the presenters on an ongoing basis for a few days, as the conference is small enough to allow for that.

It’s also a chance to enjoy camaraderie from Oracle professionals from around the world. Yep, this conference is so good that people fly in from overseas to attend.

Plus the food is great, and there’s a party on Tuesday night.

On the lighter side, here are some non-technical highlights:

During Tom Kyte’s presentation, someone’s Siri piped up, “I’m not sure what you’ve just said.” I didn’t have any expectation that she’d understand index cluster factors. Actually, she probably wouldn’t have liked the discussion about type casting or pushing predicates, either. Can you imagine being Tom Kyte’s Siri?

This is an intelligent crowd, so it wasn’t surprising to hear of their children’s admissions to medical school, other children in their medical residencies, and other children abroad in exchange programs.

At the party on Tuesday, several tables had Jenga games going. I’m very impressed at the steady-handedness of those DBA/developers!

I already mentioned the food was good. This of course didn’t go unnoticed by the other attendees. We somewhat jokingly discussed having walking treadmills installed in the back of each presentation hall. Truthfully, I bet people would use them, if only they were quiet enough.

I saw purposeful inclusion of cultures further east, and it made me smile – I’ve seen vegetarian food at the Symposium for many years now, but I noticed kulfi (the Indian equivalent of Western ice cream) available in the frozen treats cart during an afternoon break, and I noticed the deejay at the party was playing some Bollywood hits.

One attendee’s laptop had a sticker which said, “My other computer is a data center.”

Kerry Osborne’s presentation was about problem-solving styles. One slide divided people into quadrants, with the two axes being smart-or-stupid and industrious-or-lazy. Kerry had read that a military leader said there was good use for all the combinations, except stupid and industrious, which was a downright dangerous combination!

I hope we’ll see YOU at Symposium next year!

Mary Elizabeth McNeely

The Dallas chapter of ATW (the Alliance of Technology and Women) hosts a yearly event that highlights careers in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).  The target audience is older girls.  This year the event was at the Winspear opera house.  ATW invited McNeely to host a table so we could talk to the girls about database administration careers.  I’m the only “girl” DBA at McNeely, so I borrowed a “girl” DBA from another local technology firm, and we manned the table.  (Manned?  Womaned?)

Many girls came by the table.  Some were from local magnet schools; some were from scouting organizations.  The first thing that struck me was how polite they were; the second was how quiet they were.  At their age, I’d never been in a convention-like environment, nor had I seen that many adults concentrated in one place for the purpose of talking to me about my future.  It must have seemed like an awful lot of information at once.

Questions we answered many times: What is a database?  How did you get your DBA job?  They really call you in the middle of the night and you have to fix the database – right then?  You own a company – it’s your company?

One of the older girls was not originally from the United States, and her take on databases was quite different than the others.  She felt that it was a bad idea to concentrate data about people in one place, that it violated their rights.  She said government of her native country collects and analyzes data about the internet activity of its citizens, and it uses the data to persecute them.  I didn’t say this to her, but that same data is almost certainly collected here too – a drib here and a drab there – by ISPs, by tracking cookies, by Google, by others, and who knows – maybe the government, too.  We’ll have to be vigilant that we don’t reach the “persecution” phase.

After the convention style part of the morning was over, the girls got a tour of the opera house, and then they went to the auditorium to hear lectures by various female technologists and a panel discussion by college students from various STEM majors.

I hope this can be good food for thought for the girls and that some of them will seriously consider STEM careers.

Mary Elizabeth McNeely