In my many years of Enterprise DBA servitude, there would be many instances of blanket ‘the devs are idiots’ statements. Sometimes by me, sometimes by others and from the perspective of the database it was usually justifiable. In these enviornments, this is acceptable. I have no idea what busy work task they have come up with and why should I even care about anything out side of my database? These AppsDevs are disgusting dirty creatures that just sling filth everywhere as they stomp their hooves on the keyboard. Worthless.

Inner Joined at the Hip

What I enjoy most about the above mindset is the expectation of the AppDev to know their job and be equally proficient at my own. They must be fluent in the language of Stored Procedures else everything collapses from the data hate speech that comes from their object-pooriented programs. I’ve often wondered where this one sidedness originated from. For a bit I thought it was just something that happened at places I worked. It’s not just there though. Check out your local communities and you’ll see the imbalance there as well. I attend both database user groups and developer based user groups. I often see a fair amount of AppDevs at sql events… I pretty much never see DBAs at developer events.

Cross Apply What You Know

A few years back, I got involved in with a few open source .NET ORMs. It goes without saying that ORMs are the Vietnam of the software world and I was pretty much blown away at how desperate these projects were for feedback. It was so easy and fun to help out and it totally changed my opinion of ORMs. It also changed my opinion of the curmudgeoned DBA. If you want some contrast/perspective, I’ve also helped out a few ‘open source’ database projects by their prefered method - email.

Refactor the Query

The more time you spend with AppDevs the more you realize just how many of them are stuck with really bad DBAs. Now when I hear DBAs complain I ask the following of them: What open source work do you do? What dev conferences do you attend with the team? What have you personally built? What source control do you use so that the team can see your scripts and ask about them?

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to know how the people I’m talking about answer the above questions. Like so many things with humans, the loud ones with the most generic argument are typically doing the least to fix the problem. If you are an Oracle/SQL Server DBA, don’t just hide behind our industry specific firewalls - get out there. Engage the AppDevs, review their code, help some project, make your scripts public for them to see. We’ve sat in our foxholes long enough and the AppDevs are not our enemy. It’s our turn to build the bridge.