This week I got a call from one of my colleagues on the East Coast. Apparently some Federal agency needs a bit of assistance and is kicking off an interesting project. I actually like the East Coast but am working to build up a few things in my backyard. He asked me of my particular expertise, as we hadn't yet worked together and I filled him in. It wasn't until I got off the phone that I realized something. Now I'm an insider.
One of the primary reasons I have not expanded my relational DBA and architecture skills is because despite the fact that I have the background and basic capability, I have never been given the keys. I can recall numerous occasions in which people on projects would be stuck and I would be finished - 'and if we could only clone you...' (and get me for a lower rate) everything would be cool. I would twiddle my thumbs waiting for them to find the rare and wiley Informatica expert; when they finally got them on board, I would tell the guy what to build. I would have a logical model of exactly what I needed the feed from the data warehouse to be for my ODS and staging areas and I would twiddle waiting for their DBA to materialize and then materialize some views.
And so for a guy with as many years as I have in RDBMS, considering I did my first subselects and star schemas in 1991 on DB2, you'd think I'd know a lot more about VLDB, partitioning and various other fine points of physical database design. But I don't. But now I'm an insider, and I can pick all that up again and then some because the guys in our shop are original gangsters of Oracle. They knew Scott when he was a tiger (and there's some old school inside Oracle for you).
Life is interesting.
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