Oracle’s grumpy old men
According to Sandy Mamoli, “Oracle people” are a “conservative bunch” and “it is about time to admit that some input from the outside would do no harm”. She also believes that Oracle DBAs and developers come across as “grumpy old men (and women) who oppose change and who want the IT world to remain the same as it was in the 1980s”.
I believe this was part of her response to Niall’s comment that he “strongly disagrees” with the agile development methodology.
Wow! I have been an Oracle developer since 1992 and I still have the urge to learn and try new things all the time. I have never thought of myself as an Oracle conservative nor as a grumpy old man! Have you?
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Filed in Oracle on 24 Oct 05 | Tags: agile, conservative
Yes, I wrote this entry as a response to Niall’s comment. I did by no means wish to imply that I considered Niall to be a grumpy old man – on the contrary I really liked his comment and I am looking forward to some good discussions about agile development.
I found Niall’s comment very inspiring and it made me remember why I started to look into agile methods, unit testing, test driven development etc which are the ideas of the development community.
Maybe this is not us who write and read blogs (we have at least heard of blogging
but I have spent a lot of time argumenting with DBAs who still refuse to use any Oracle features newer than Oracle 6.0. (Last time when I used Oracle types in plsql I was asked why I had introduced object oriented features)
I have experienced a gap between old fashioned DBAs and developers that I think is counter productive. And I think we should all at least try to understand new ideas to either embrace them or to discard them as the crazy ideas they are. We should recognize the need to educate developers in sound databae techniques to help them use the power of databases.
And maybe you had this all worked out long before me (sorry for being slow) but I started seeing myself as the Oracle traditionalist I was and wanted to escape this trap before people would perceive me as a grumpy old DBA/plsql developer woman …
Hmmm, every Oracle DBA I’ve ever met is pretty grumpy. There have been a couple where its been hard to tell, mainly because they only spoke Chinese.
Sandy, I believe that you and I are on the same page. I do relate to your experiences with DBAs. The DBA/Developer relationship is an age old issue.
The way I keep myself up to date is to have my own Oracle database installation on my own PC. That way, I can learn and try out new things without asking permission from anyone.
I am glad that we are on the same page. I do know great, modern and progressive DBAs and responsible and database savy developers.
And I agree that the issue is age old. But I still think it can and should be resolved.
(At least we should try not to become those Oracle 6.0 DBAs when Oracle 23g will be out in 10 years
)
For as long as some sectors of the developer community insist on the attitude that anything that isn’t the “new black” must of necessity be old-fashioned and therefore forcibly “inefficient”, the gap will be there between those who have been around slightly longer than the latest release and those who think the sun started to shine when they learned to talk.
dba/developer has nothing to do with it and is quite frankly a total mis-representation of the matter.
Most of the tennets of agile development read like the absolute basics of ANY development methodology of 30 years ago. The whole thing is nothing more nothing less than a re-hash of ages-old principles with liberal doses of marketspeak thrown in to make it glossy. It adds absolutely no value whatsoever other than uttering common platitudes would.
No surprises why it gets no respect from the folks who have been around a little longer and who went through all that years ago.
Want to be respected by your more experienced peers? Here is a hint: respect back. This may come as a total surprise but no one died and gave you a certificate of “all-knowing”. Goes both ways of course, like I said.
And that’s about all I’ll add to this, quite frankly: not even worth arguing about.
As you can see at the posting dates, i just read this one 30 months after… About the grumpability fachtor (or something like that) of Nuno Souto , I’d say : he’s defenatly a DBA and retired in the mean time