3 ms·

One of the things I find most annoying about DBAs is they don’t understand just how utterly awful their tooling is. The error messages alone should be enough to

by setr 1y ago

One of the things I find most annoying about DBAs is they don’t understand just how utterly awful their tooling is. The error messages alone should be enough to throw a hissy fit, but as a group they’ve never dreamed of a life better than the misery of ERROR ON LINE 1: <entire query> The aggressively common pipe-delimited sproc output (the standard hack to get around commas being common in strings, instead of finding a legitimate data format) is another clear example of the brain damage the poor DBA incurs through constant investment in “modern” relational databases.

lucketone 1y ago
I ran away from comfy DB-centered job, just because of the quality of the tooling. Technically it is good enough to perform the function, but at the same time it’s just soul-crushing how much quality of life is being wasted.
TristanBall 1y ago
Larping as a dba now, and trust me many of us do know, and its a source of ongoing suffering, but we're often not developers and don't necessarily have the choice of tooling. Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else. Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one. And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats. What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it

by setr 1y ago

lucketone 1y ago

I ran away from comfy DB-centered job, just because of the quality of the tooling. Technically it is good enough to perform the function, but at the same time it’s just soul-crushing how much quality of life is being wasted.

TristanBall 1y ago

Larping as a dba now, and trust me many of us do know, and its a source of ongoing suffering, but we're often not developers and don't necessarily have the choice of tooling. Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else. Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one. And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats. What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it