When LOST finishes this year, we’re going to need some new entertainment. Here’s the shows that I’m pitching to the major networks:
Dancing With The SELECT *’s
Every week, celebrity developers are paired with SQL Server MVPs to manage SQL Servers. Tune in to find out if these coders can make their data dance, or if their efforts will fall flat.
Dirty SQL Agent Jobs
Every week, host Mike Row (no, not Rowe) searches the country for those thankless scheduled tasks that keep your servers in good shape. He’ll interview the ones in the trenches – maintenance plans, index defrag scripts, and mirroring alerts.
The Deadliest Try/Catch
It’s not just the Bering Sea – it’s the Bering C#. Ever seen those computers on the Captain’s dashboard that track where the crab pots are laid out? This is where the real work is done – inside the database. Forget the diesel engines and check out the database engines as we join the ship’s mechanic: Adam Machanic.
SSIS
When crime impacts the government database community, the SQL Server Investigative Service team jumps into action. They might be disarmed forces, but they have keyboard hotkeys programmed to fire off KILL commands.
Law and ORDER BY
The police procedural genre has spawned countless spinoffs, and now it’s time to CREATE another one: the stored procedural show. Turn your volume up, set nocount on, and join us for this brutal thriller that will solve a new execution plan every week.
Magnum, BI
Ever wonder where the “master” database got its name? That’s right – Robin Masters. Turn the clock back thirty years and join us in Hawaii to witness the birth of Business Intelligence. Is Brad McGehee really the butler, or is he the man running the whole show? You’ll have to watch to find out.
Doctor SP_Who
For decades, the cult British classic has tried and failed to make its way to the American shores, but this version is surely destined for success. If this one doesn’t succeed, we’ll reboot it as Doctor SP_Who2.
It’s Your Turn! Pitch Us Your Show
Think you can top these? Give it your best shot in the comments before Monday, January 4th. My personal favorite will win an autographed copy of my new book, Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. Good luck!
BIGint Brother
Yes that’s right, after years of wandering the globe looking for new locations the reality show has now added a SQL Twist. DBAs, Developers and a few secret project managers thrown in for kicks. Tune in to watch the madness unfold!
Survivor: Seattle
Special edition of Survivor that takes place during the PASS Summit conference. Tune in to watch the DBEnginala’s take on the BI-BI tribe in a battle to see who can down the most Yeager. Who will sing their way out of Tribal Karaoke? Outwit, Outdrink, Outcode.
Brian Knight Rider
Thought your ride was fast? Watch as this SSIS master takes his sentient talking car, Drivable Offroad iNtelligence Automated Living riDe, or D.O.N.A.L.D. for short, and fights crime and bad BI designs everywhere!
Whose Line (of Code) is it Anyway?
Join us as we gather 5 SQL smartasses together and let them loose on stage! These guys are given a topic and let loose. Write down “bad television show ripoffs”.
Don’t forget SSIS: Farmville and SSIS: Jacksonville (nods to Andy Leonard and Brian Knight.)
Furthermore, on Mondays at 10pm please JOIN us for the BATCHelor, where 20 attractive women of sketchy moral character vie for the attention of a dashing SQL Server DBA. Who will get the ROWs? Tune in to find out!
you forgot the most famous show of all
Query eye for the database guy!!!!
“Whose Line of Code Is It Anyway?” Where Developers blame each other for bad coding after being caught by the DBA. Or where they write code on the fly with suggestions from the audience while wearing funny hats and not using their own hands.
Let me expand on mine
Query eye for the database guy!!!!
Five database gurus who specialize in design, administration, querying, performance, and business intelligence go to the rescue of helpless accidental DBAs with no sense of RDBMs nor anything else and do a complete make over.
At the beginning of each episode they show the chaotic queries of the database guy with his folders full of saved ad hoc queries. They help him and he becomes a SQL super guru
Beauty and the Geek
No changes needed.
Hell’s Server Room
Watch the ScaryDBA, Grant Fritchey, yell at people as they bumble and stumble their way around administrating SQL Servers. That’s pretty much it.
You mean a reality series filming my current job? I’m not sure that’d sell.
Giggler’s Island
Watch as 7 stranded and hapless Office users attempt to get off a deserted island using only Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and coconut creme pies. The bumbling antics and convoluted macros are sure to bring a smile to your face. Cameo appearances throughout the season by SQL Server stalwarts who try to help the crew of the SS Minnow get rescued.
* Trek Next Generation
Pilot: Encounter at Checkpoint
In the first 21st Century Star Trek, we meet Captain Ben-Gan Picard, commander of the Microsoft flagship SQLEnterprise. En route to the distant Checkpoint Station, the SQLEnterprise is made to wait by the all-powerful, capricious being Queue, who judges the SQLEnterprise crew of DBAs as unworthy. Queue stops our heroes from continuing its five year mission to seek out new data and new quantifications, until they first pass a performance test. Once they arrive at Checkpoint Station, the away team – led by the Captain’s #1, Commander William P. Randall – find the city mysteriously filled to capacity.
Make your own Commander Data jokes here.
Robot SQLChicken
15 minutes of random blogs posts that have no rhyme or reason but all your friends (who may/may not be under the influence of bacon/Yeager) agree is awesome. Everyone outside of the SQL community “doesn’t get it” but buys you the DVD of it anyways.
The Amazing SQL Race
JOIN eleven teams (known as spids) as they trot through line after line of database code in a quest to find the fastest query. At the end of each episode, the spid with the slowest response time will be killed – metaphorically, that is. The show will also feature bizarre tasks, such as Deadlock and Rollback, that only one team member can perform. Which is faster, a temp table or a table variable? It depends, so tune in every Monday night to find out which team comes out on TOP.
The (DB)A-Team
After being sentenced to deal with abysmal code and uncooperative developers, they promptly escaped from a maximum security datacenter and survive as DBAs of fortune…
Love it! I can picture it now…
“I pity the fool that don’t normalize their tables!”
“I love it when a query plan comes together”
What about “Ozar’s DB Nightmares”
Brent will come in to a miscellaneous IT shop (at their request of course) and fret over the state of their database, how reports are running insanely slow, and how some “hot shot programmer” made a schema and procedure that would make you want to keck.
You toss in a few free SQL licenses, maybe a box or two, clean up the DB and return a year later to see how they are nothing short of the awesomeness.
***
On a sidenote, I’d rather see SSIS an investigation into SSIS packages themselves and the uber odd quirks (like an obsolete database SSID being persisted and thus causing grief with the scheduled version of the job). You’ve got a great lineup of “standard characters” (the data transformation job, the custom script job, error log file (where they put all the dead jobs to check out potential cause of death). Plus you can have a “retro” episode where none other than SQL DTS 2000 Wrapper comes shows up as a “dead body” on the show.
Yes, the syopsis is part rant, part humor, but I’ve had my own experiences with SSIS that I think it would be a fun show. 8^D
These would make an awesome calendar…kinda like the spoof calendars that Chick-Fil-A puts out each year (http://shopchick-fil-a.com/default.aspx/act/Catalog.aspx/catalogid/297/category/Bookstore/browse//MenuGroup/Products/desc/The+2010+Chick-fil-A%c2%ae+Calendar). Do we have any graphic artists that have some spare time?
One for the kids (and big kids) SpongeBob SQLpants
He lives in the SQL code with his friends SPID and ROW and tries to tidy up bad code while singing silly karaoke songs.
Fill Factor
Contestants try to optimize indices as quickly as possible. Winners get a paltry sum while losers are stuck eating live bugs or performing some other task that would probably be scary if they weren’t wearing a safety harness.
@Bob:
There must be a way to work in a joke about Dr. Fill somewhere.
MAXDOP-room
Find out who is on “the list” as a CGI animated Buck Woody appears out of nowhere to insult everyone around him as well as those that are not around him.
Tales from the Encrypt
Whisper the passphrase to receive an asymmetric database master key and unlock the Encrypt Keeper’s terrifying tales of data mayhem…. if you dare!!!
Chuck.
Linchi Shea emails me all of his infrastructure secrets via an email and they somehow end up in my brain and I have to go about saving the IT world when I “flash”. I don’t care if the story’s really lame or not, I just want to work with Yvonne Strahovski and Julia Ling. The sacrifices I’ll make for our community…
The VIEW.
According to Books Online [CREATE VIEW]: Creates a virtual table that represents the data in one or more tables in an alternative way.
This TV Show presents one or more (female) tables JOINed at a virtual table contributing their personal opinion data.
Kind of lame, but what the heck?
St. ELSE-WHERE
A drama set in the “dumping ground” where rows end up that don’t satisfy the WHERE clause of queries. In the final episode, it is revealed that the whole series actually took place in the mind/imagination of a DBA named Tommy Westphall.
A lonely DBA is transported from a dreary, black and white existence in the plains of Kansas by a tornado and deposited in a land of Technicolor and excitement, in the new series: “The Wizard of Ozar”. The lonely DBA seeks the advice of the Great and Powerful Ozar, but soon discovers that there is no place like home.
HAHAHA! I was trying not to respond to these to pick favorites yet, but this one hit a little too close to home.
Pay no attention to the Index Tuning Wizard behind the curtain…
some WHERE over the rainbow…
The Back Office.
Steve Carell takes the IT shop to the next level.
CR*A*S*H
A series about a group of DBAs and support staff who treat injured databases, helping them RECOVER and RESTOREing them back to health so they can return to the server front lines.
Forgot to mention that the series takes place in Corea.
Okay, that was stretching it… never mind.
I was thinking along the lines of D*B*C*C but ya beat me to it!
The Database Whisperer.
This is actually how I describe what I do for a living to non geeks. Can’t believe no one suggested it yet…
That show stars Michael J. Swart, right?
http://michaeljswart.com/
sure.
The bRAIDy Bunch
The wacky antics of a large family of disc drives.
Forgot to mention that a DBA named Alice does maintenance on the SAN that they call home.
Welcome Back, Cotter.
The Highlander.
Starring Paul Randal.
“There can be only one”
I stole that from Tom LaRock.
This one has actually been around for a while:
JOE CELKO THE SQL APPRENTICE
http://joecelkothesqlapprentice.blogspot.com/
Indiana Jimmy and the Disk Partition Alignment of Doom
By all appearances a scholar, Jimmy May is all of that and more. He uses his deep knowledge of Disk Partition Alignment to navigate the mysterious SAN to save the day.
Starring @aspiringgeek
The Six Million Dollar SAN
Better… Stronger… Faster!
Trace:1999
Dumps information into the error log when nuclear waste on the Moon suddenly explodes, breaking it out of its orbit and hurling it into outer space to experience really crappy boring adventures.
Real Housewives of DBCC
Coming to Bravo in 2010: A reality show about shallow women DBAs who mis-use DBCC commands. One of the housewives, Michaele Salahi, ends up crashing a server at the White House.
I’d like to sign up to be on the Real Housewives of DBCC. Where can i submit my casting director’s number?
Little House on the Query
A nice wholesome family show about a family of DBAs (the Ingalls) who live on a server farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
Sesame Tweet
A breakthrough children’s show, an hour-long program made up of short segments or skits lasting no more than 140 seconds each, since children do not have long attention spans.
Null House
A stupid show with NO VALUE WHATSOEVER about three guys raising three daughters… (insert joke about three-valued logic here).
America’s Next Top Model Database
A trashy reality show in which a dozen 85-pound women DBAs compete to solve challenges in putting together a winning MODEL database. Tyra Banks and her band of self-important judges humiliate and eliminate a contestant each week. The winner gets a contract and a spread in SQL Server Magazine.
The Batchelor
Twenty-five attractive and insipid scripts vie for the attention of some guy scheduling SQL Server Agent jobs.
(Okay, now I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel… you can tell it’s a do-nothing holiday week)
Oops… looks like Tim Ford already thought of this one. “Who will get the ROWs?” Love it.
The Weakest Linked Server
When too many pings to a linked server get dropped, the host casually dismisses the server with a curt “Goobye!”
Cold CASE
A mystery series following investigators who spend days looking through unused case statements in long blocks, trying to determine what someone once thought they were doing.
The Suite Life of Quest and Toady
A riveting new documentary from Ken Burns about the evolution of the Toad Development Suite for SQL Server by Quest Software.
How about “The Code Whisperer” starring Joe Celko as he mumbles while reading seemingly anonymous proc code, (which no one will claim), trying to imagine what its’ purpose was and what caused it to die (or why it should die)?
Several other crazy titles popped into my head this morning:
The Sgt. Celko Show
The Host and Mrs. VIEWer
The OUTER JOIN Limits
CURSOR Jackie (starring Edie Falco, who everyone thinks is addicted to OxyContin but in reality she’s just naturally slow)
FULL JOIN House (Yeah, I agree, I liked the NULL House entry from yesterday better)
Family WITH TIES (starring Michael J. TOP)
FAST_FORWARD (Everyone on earth goes unconscious for 2 minutes and 17 seconds because they’re bored to death waiting for a CURSOR-based procedure to finish)
lmao at FAST_FORWARD!
The Deadlock Zone
A horror tale of a serial killer stalking innocent queries. Who is this mysterious ‘deadlock detector’ and will our intrepid team of query tuners be able to identify the target query before the killer strikes again
I forgot to include this one this morning…
The Incredible BULK INSERT
When DBA David Banner gets frustrated doing a BULK INSERT, he turns into a monster!
/some fun for the little DBAs/:
Dora the SQL Explorer
With Boots the Performance Monkey and her friends – The Dynamic Magic VIPs she fights against Swipper the Worst Performing
She can always consult her Backpack Online or get advices from the Map /that redirects her to the nearest MVP community/
The Profiler.
Sort of like The Mole. Unlike The Mole, the more intently he monitors the situation the worse everyone else performs. Oh, also unlike the mole, this might actually have viewers.
Secondary plot line:
Murder mystery where victims disappear without a trace.
American Idle Wait Stats
Mighty Morphin Power RANGEs
Unsuspecting teens become endowed the power to query in various color-coded forms (coloring courtesy of @mladenpradjic ‘s SSMS Tools Pack). Led by Buckdon, a giant floating head in a tube, they set out to kung-fu the crap out of databases everywhere.
Jeff Rush just inspired this one…
Without a Trace
Auditing information from databases disappears and a crack team of DBA’s are sent into investigate…
“SQL” in the City
New this season the dynamic divas, Tripp, Delaney, Moss and Rubbelke are at it again. Don’t miss the season premier where these ladies tantalize R2 into reveling deep dark secrets. Special guest appearance by Paul Randal as Mr. Big.
Simple Recovery.
Tired of dealing with Hollywood starlets Dr. Drew focuses his
exploitationmuch needed attention and therapy on dealing with addiction in a small rural town.Ok, so I stole this one from a yellowing, old Foxtrot comic strip pinned to my bulletin board:
Query Eye for the Database Guy
Ha! Unfortunately a few people beat you to it – scroll up higher in the comments.
Everybody LIKE ‘%Raymond%’
Raymond is surrounded by a number of random characters in this stringy affair.
LOL… Great entry, Lance!
Inspired by Lance.
Charles IN (‘Charge’)
A flood of new titles came to me in the last 24 hours… Most of them are really stupid, but I just jotted them down as they came to me:
In rough order of when they appeared on television:
XML RAWhide
The DATETIME Tunnel
CUBEy-Doo, Where Are You?
The Rockford Filegroups
Welcome Backup, Kotter
VARP() in Cincinnati
Hill Street Queues (a decade later came NYPD Queue)
Query, She Wrote (DBA Jessica Fletcher solves mysteries on the side)
Doogie Howser MDX (A whiz kid at multi-dimensional queries)
Partition of Five
Spindle City
Buffer the Vampire Slayer
Techs in the City
30 LOCK
Friday Night Bytes
–Brad
Lost in Transactions – talk show for newbies and accidental dbas directed by Coppola
BETWEEN the SARG
Tune in every weak and see Lionel, Liona, Theo and Cleo struggle with column-manipulation and inclusive/exclusive ranges until Arty Smartypants shows them how to avoid RBAR queries and show that the SARG must flow by teaching them to read the fine manual.
Deadlock Betty – her life in a constant state of victimization, Betty meets a DBA, and is swept away transactionally, but can she avoid a deadly embrace as a scheduled SQL Agent job secretly puts a database lock on her new friend’s personal data? Can she get any help from her DBA’s friend, Profiler? Will she be able to help her DBA avoid being the latest deadlock victim?
Tune in to channel 2008 R2 for the next riveting episode !!!
SQL Community
A smart comedy series about a band of misfits who attempt to resolve database issues and form a group community and eventually learn more about themselves than their course work.
FULLTEXT and the City
4 DBA’s of various character and morals are let loose in the big city.