Here’s how the interview started:
Forrest Brazeal: Brent, you’re a performance specialist who’s worked with massive SQL Server deployments; how does it make you feel when you hear cloud architects saying things like “relational databases don’t scale?” What do you wish they knew?
Brent Ozar: They’re right. Nothing scales worth a damn. Even stuff that looks easy, like Amazon S3 file storage, can run into scaling problems if you design it without an analysis of how AWS partitions reads, and how you have to watch out for your object prefixes.
But the thing is, nobody reads the documentation.
Read the interview here. I had a lot of fun with it.
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If you would have asked me in 1998 what databases looked like in 2021, back when I was running Personal Oracle on my laptop to do development against Oracle backed applications, I would have assumed it would look much different than it does now! It seems working with databases hasn’t changed much in 25 years, so I assume it won’t change much in the next 5. 25 years from now though, I’d be shocked if we even have the concept of databases. It will (hopefully) be more like “here’s a place to stick your stuff” and we won’t care about indexing, parallelism or all the other minutia of current databases.
Hey Brent, why do you think the developers hate the enterprise features of SQL, because they are difficult to implement or because they don’t work as expected? I am looking from the perspective of an architect that finds some useful (ex. AD integration), some desirable, but I don’t want to push things to developers without understanding why they push back (Newton’s law).
Yes
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RTFM, High Filter eMail & other communication rant: I once supported an application that had dozens of Excel spreadsheets. I had to use VBA to control the workflow, and when I’d make a change, or announce a maintenance window I’d email the users group. Nobody ever read my emails. I coded a VBA module that used the users table and messages child table to force them to see a message page that came up and held the screen for 15 seconds, before taking then to their menu page in the spreadsheet. I marked that message as viewed in a many-to-many bridge table, so that they wouldn’t suffer the indignity of me holding up their work more than once per message.
I had to do something similar to this, several of the staff had rules that auto moved / deleted messages from the IT department or individuals from the IT department.
They were the first people to complain when we had to do maintenance and then swore blind they didn’t receive any warnings or information.