South Korean musician Psy’s hilarious music video for Oppa Gangnam Style has been tearing up the charts:
Sure, it’s catchy, but it turns out there’s a message behind it. Gangnam is an absurdly wealthy area of South Korea, like America’s Beverly Hills meets The Hamptons meets Tokyo. Just like anywhere else in the world, the people who have inspire the people who don’t – but only inspired to spend like they have it, not inspired to actually make it. As a result, there’s a running joke in South Korea about women who spend $2 on ramen for lunch and then spend $6 on coffee.
Psy’s actually from Gangnam, and his video is a series of cut-together scenes that at first look glamorous – but then turn out to be pretty sub-par. For example, it opens with him sunning in the sand, but as the camera zooms out, you can see he’s really at a children’s playground, looking like an idiot. He’s really making a social comment, and you can read more in The Atlantic’s piece on Oppa Gangnam Style.
In America, it’d be like a gangster rapper poking fun at guys who claim to be tough, wealthy pimps, but who drive their $100,000 car home to their $50,000 house and proceed to spend the weekend doing chores while their wives relax on the couch. (I love it already.)
SQL Gangnam Style
Everybody wants 80 cores and 1 terabyte of memory on their database servers – and yeah, we work on those. It’s fun to open Task Manager and look at all the pretty pixels. I’ll save you the math: at sticker price, that’s over half a million dollars just for the SQL Server licensing alone. (Thankfully, in these circles, nobody pays sticker price.)
Notice how those CPUs are just sitting there idle, not doing anything? Hmm.
SQL Server 2012’s new core-based licensing means we have to stop flushing our money down the drain on accident. Our SQL Server needs a balanced diet: we can’t afford to spend $6 on coffee and skip lunch.
SQL Server’s version of a balanced diet is a balance between:
- How fast the SQL Server’s CPUs can consume data
- How fast the storage can deliver the data
- How fast the pipes are between the CPUs and the storage
If you’ve invested all your money in one of the three, and the other two are horrific, you’re Gangnam Style.
It’s fun to dance around doing the pony trot while yelling that you’re Gangnam Style, but don’t do SQL Gangnam Style. Spread your budget around to get the right combination of CPU, storage, and throughput in order to make your app fly.
3 Comments. Leave new
I am beyond disappointed that you did not include a clip of your own Gangnam dance that you have been spending so much time perfecting in front of the Hovet mirror.
Once again you’ve managed to use a catchy post title to get me to learn about SQL Server! Good stuff.
My dad once bought some iPhones to sell in Egypt (about $350 each for a refurbished one when it came out). He sold one of them for $1000. No big deal right? I mean people were buying them for that much off of Ebay when they first came out. Well the person that bought it probably spent a year saving that $1000. Buy hey, he can tell people he has an iPhone that costs about three months of rent 🙂
Funny how this concept is universal and not just limited to the “All flash no cash” rappers we have here in the U.S.
Brent,
I would echo the comment of Emily, I have you down as a “Talk the talk, walk the walk” type of guy, as such I’m bitterly disappointed not to see a video of the Brent Ozar PLF team doing the Gangnam Style dance on youtube.
Chris