That’s right, you heard me.
Your manager doesn’t care about best practices. You can beat your chest and wail about putting the SQL Server data and log files on separate arrays, and your manager doesn’t care. The instant you’re out of earshot, your manager starts complaining to his manager about how you won’t shut up and just do your dang job. He sees you as using best practices as a crutch or an excuse.
To make matters worse, best practices aren’t 100% applicable to every situation. Just this morning I was advising someone to avoid using “IS NULL” in their where clauses because it’s best practices to avoid conditions that aren’t sargable. They promptly showed me that in their particular situation, the database engine was still using the right index – and now I’m backpedaling trying to figure out why.
When I’m writing a SQL Server performance report, I’m very careful to watch out for the phrase “best practices.” If I have to use it, I’ll try to back it up with real statistics from the client’s environment. If I just say, “You need to do this because it’s best practices,” I’ve instantly lost credibility with the client. Heck, in my own environments, I don’t do everything according to best practices – I just don’t have the time and resources. Best practices cost money and time, and in an economy like this, best practices are thrown even farther out of the window.
In yesterday’s blog entry about always aliasing tables, I didn’t just say, “Do it because it’s best practices.” I showed why it’s important, how it can cause downtime, and why it costs time over the long haul. When you’re asking your developers, clients or managers to do something, follow that same example.
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Of course Best Practice could arguably be “Best Practice in *these* standard environments”. They act as a basis to start off your company best practice guidelines, then you can justify deviations if necessary. Seems common sense to me 🙂
Good post. I painfully learned this the first year in IT. I thought the meeting was going to be about the database. Instead it turned into, get your job done.
Edafe – what’s a standard environment? When you walk into a company as a database administrator, how can you tell what’s going on behind the scenes? How do you know why things were put into place over the years? That’s where it gets to be tough. Any of us can start a new server with a new application using best practices and feel comfortable with it, but that’s a small minority of database administration work.
It works that way in other arenas too. I am not a SQL expert, though I aspire to become one. I am an expert in the ERP system that I administer however. My current employer hired me for that expertise. However, when I tried to inform them that they were not using the software correctly, and that’s why they were having so many problems with it, I was informed that this was the way they wanted to do it. I would have to customize the software using VBA and other technologies to “make it work.”
There are no “best practices,” there are only “our practices” in some firms.
Best Practice = Best Practice in MOST environments?
or
Best Practice = Best Practice because I am paid to say those things, otherwise I’d be out of job if the environment is perfect =P
I mostly hear “Best practice” from vendors and as a “covering our behind” with because it best practice instead of saying we don’t know so we are using the vendors guidelines to fill in the blanks. I would agree that best practice can be used to be inspired by and changed for the particular business. An Oracle consultant here came up with “Worst practice”. Worst practice is those things you never should do, but again weighted as best practice as a guideline.