Anyone dealing with people has to be part psychologist, part philosopher, and part chess master.
Psychologist, because we have to provide therapy to people who can’t properly formulate requirements,
or can’t deliver under pressure.
Philosopher, because we often have to define what things are, how to determine if they exist or not, etc.
And last, but not least — Chess Master, because we have to make many simultaneous plans,
and think as many steps ahead as possible.
So what about the DBA? You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
When it comes to data, we have a heavy emphasis on philosophy. Some people try to present these issues in a very colloquial and approachable way, for example – William Kent’s famous “Data and Reality” is written without a single philosophical or mathematical term. An amazing accomplishment, if you ask me — even if he is simply talking about data modeling issues centered around identity. Still, most people find it hard to read and even harder to understand.
Imagine the difficulties people run into when they try to tackle more advanced data issues. For example, ensuring data consistency, or ensuring that entity identity is not altered throughout all transitions, or trying to implement Master Data Management (MDM).
Even relatively trivial situations can prove to be extremely challenging. For example, BitWise was recently asked to sync an on-premise WMS with an online store-front. No problem, right? Well, it turns out that this WMS allowed for different types of items, whereas the online store only had one.
But can’t all formats be transformed into one?!
Well, yes, except that in this case the field naming and content wasn’t consistent. So, before you know it we were facing the prospect of starting to create a hard-coded logic tree. And the WMS operators would suddenly have had to worry about how they input data because …
“It may break the ETL”.
That’s where BitWise got philosophical: We identified the underlying logic for field assignment and item type definition, and translated that into a dynamic logic. This way WMS operators could continue working as they did before, and the ETL wouldn’t break just because a stock item had a “wrong” option.
As the client put it – “Whenever I ask BitWise for something, it appears as if by magic!”
That’s philosophy for ya. Or just great DBA skills.
We like people, so feel free to call or write. Humans only.
