On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Ed Kohlwey wrote:
I could have said "if you ascribe to the notion that cloud computing is
an increasingly dominant factor in the computer industry, and you plan
on working for a company that produces web applications, does scientific
computing, or produces any other application involving distributed data
and/or processing of data then this presentation is a must!" That might
have been a little more specific, but I think I fell asleep half way
through writing it. The bottom line is that a lot of people think that
this kind of data distribution strategy will become increasingly common
in the computer industry, so it's relevant to our audience.
No, see, that's exactly what I disagree with. Being a DBA is a
_specialty_, one that, in my experience, less than 5% of computer
professionals work in. Is it useful to know how drizzle works and how to
configure it? Yes. Do you have to know how it works in order to use it?
No! Chances are that if you're a drizzle (or any other non-trivial DB)
user, then you need to know 1) SQL and 2) an API such as perl's DBI. You
usually don't need to know or care about the back end, because there is a
DBA whose job it is to think about these things, which you don't have time
to think about because you're too busy doing development, or sysadminning
or QA or whatever.
BTW, now that you've weighed your two cents in you're obligated to come
to the presentation and debate the technical merits of the application
during our discussion period. :)
Nope, sorry. I don't know the relative technical merits of various SQL
databases, and I would not be able to learn them well enough to be a DBA
without spending several years learning. I claim that I don't have to know
these things, and neither does any computer professional that does not
intend to be a DBA.
Alexey
