Like a committed lover, my electricity bill remains unchanged, unflinching and unmoved. Even if I stay 15 days of the month in my apartment, he understands. Whether I keep the ac or heater switched off, it maketh no difference, his love only grows stronger. Ofcourse, this affection is not shared mutually and lately it is growing beyond my means of endurance. I now plan to use, misuse and manipulate him. I shall keep all the lights, fans and heaters on all the time and watch how he fares in the test. If the bill remains the same, hallelujah, I shall continue with the practice. If more, I shall soon threaten the electric company with dire consequences.

Life of a DBA

It was a dark and stormy night
The winds rampaged asunder;
To the world was born a DBA
It was a miracle, a wonder!

As he grew up, a thoughtful child
He recorded every session,
Of life, of love, of moments true,
Every guilt and confession.

His parents spotted his charming habit
Of cloning instances;
For he had the temper of his father
And the face of his mother
With minor version changes.

Every sysdate of his early life
Was spent in performance tuning,
His superior user environment parameters
Had the women swooning.

For he was handsome, charming and nice
And his pockets were full of money.
His cost based optimizer ensured
That his days were always sunny.

Then once day his calling came
And he leaped to join the forces,
Of the exalted men and women who make
Tables, indexes and sequences.

He copied data from schema to schema
And cleared the buffer cache.
His queries never had full table scans
His joins were always hash.

Thus progressed the perfect life
Till he was sent onsite,
The world proclaimed the mighty DBA
Had finally arrived.

This is where our DBA
Was laptoped and anointed
He was on call for a week each month,
His slumber was to be disappointed.

For every time he dozed off at night
The environment would act on its whim;
His troubleshooting skills were tested
SLA's were second nature to him.

Loading data, procedures and packages
Synonymns triggers and indexes,
He partitioned the diskspace and granted privileges
The watermark levels were never in excess.

Thus our DBA labored on
With only his work in sight,
He never noticed the pretty programmer
Seated to his right.

They never met, they never spoke
Though one cube did they infest
For when she turned to him, he was just a number:
Issue, Remedy or Change Request.

Then one day, our DBA
Set his eyes on her and rested his case,
Love fluttered like a silent beast
And filled up his tablespace.

He queried after her alright
He committed with autosave,
In his heart's rowid
Her name did he engrave.

But she implored him to rollback
For she was besotted to another,
He dealt with pointers, methods and classes
A Sun certified Java Developer.

In grief, he tried to kill v$session
And delete the audit trails,
Meanwhile he prepared to format the hard drive
For they say it never fails.

Our story ends here so far
For when database there was no more,
Our DBA's contract was terminated
They sent him packing back offshore.

PS - As if life was not getting shunted behind the computer, here's further proof that the effect is spilling over to the blog. Yesterday, when posting the above, I made the cardinal sin of using technical TLAs (Three Letter Acronymns). So, a DBA is a database administrator. They are the men and women (usually men, we women are more colourful than that) who make sure that when you go online to check your bank account, the records show that you have the booty alright. They are however, NOT the hidden hand behind the reason why sometimes that phone costs Rs2000 even after a discount of Rs100 on a base price of Rs1500. That happens due to enlightened people called programmers (such as myself) who believe in equality. So most DBA's I know are nice, harmless, soporific people who are busy trying to catch sleep between cloning databases. And when they are not on call, they like a cup of coffee and a good chat. Quite a species I tell ya!