As I picked up a nutritious breakfast from my favorite bakery (love ya, Magnolia), I noticed a sign in the window saying they were certified Kosher. As I usually do, I thought about how that kind of thing applied to databases.
The Star-K symbol on food products or restaurants means that the ingredients and processes have been inspected by a rabbi or a kosher certification company. The way I understand it, given my extensive scanning of the Wikipedia entry on kosher certification agencies, a rabbinic field rep closely monitors the restaurant’s ingredient acquisition and food preparation. He makes sure everything matches up with kosher standards, and then puts his reputation on the line to vouch for it.
I’d love to have that for databases.
What if we had a “DBA Approved” stamp that covered things like data model design, index tuning processes, good query writing, and backups that matched the company’s RPO and RTO goals?
There could be a centralized list of people who were approved to give out that certification, and they’d get regular ongoing training to make sure they were qualified to put their stamp of approval on a database.
That’d be the kind of certification I could actually get behind.
The closest I’ve seen so far is kCura’s Best in Service certification for Relativity. It’s not just about DBAs passing a test – it assesses a customer’s hosting environment and actually post the scores live every week at Trust.kCura.com so that end users know which environments are the safest bets to host their e-discovery data. I like this approach a lot, and I wish Microsoft would take a similar approach with SQL Server.
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What if we had 7 different competing DBA stamps of approval the way that Kosher food does? Commence religious database wars…. NOW.
Andrew – yeah, the discussions alone would spark riots.
We have to do something.
Brilliant!
The question is what happens as soon as someone changes anything from what was done, is the certification still valid for that system? It would keep those few people verified to offer the stamp exceedingly busy!
I’m keeping an eye out for sp_BlitzApproved. Maybe if you set the @IsThisDBKosher parameter in the next version of sp_Blitz to 1, and it is, it can print a smiling Brent ASCII pic.
lets started working on sp_BlitzApproved 🙂 …
Following things come first in my mind..
1.Same Column name in different table with different Data Type
2.Foreign key loop
3.Table with large Data without any primary key or index
..Lets create this type list then it will be more easy.. what say Brent !
I say I’m a little busy with the scripts I’ve already got. 🙂
I worked as a sous chef in Israel about 10 years and these days I’m DBA.
So, I assume, I’m Kosher Certified DBA:) lol
Throw in a source control and continuous integration requirement and I’m in!
Does that mean we won’t be able to prepare stored procedures and application logic on the same query? 🙂
Good idea, but will be very hard to implement. Still very thought-provoking…
A series of online courses crafted by industry experts. No fluffily stuff. You’d need to pre-qualify before you could even take the courses.
Once you’ve taken the core courses for a prod DBA then you get to sit for the exam.
The role changes so fast. Do you include SQL Server Cloud Architects yet? Azure… RDS?
Here’s my perf tuning course. It would be a good start but a third grader could pass the exams so it would have to be tuned and adjusted upward.
http://bit.ly/1EJVjRY
I like the CCIE and the MCM was similar to that so I’m all in favor of something similar.
Oh yeah, must have a lab component. It could be an online lab. Spin up a AMI, then give the exam via that image with specific interactions over a join.me session.
I don’t know, I’m rambling at this juncture but I’d love to see something.
I nominate Allan.