Instead of working, I blog.

Today on SSWUG, Steven talked about the new DB Architect cert from MS. I have no problem with what he said, and in fact, I even agree with most of it. However, it's really going to be hard to make any of us care about it when pretty much every company out there acts like DB work is so easy that pretty much anyone can do it. Companies go through DBAs like candy with this laissez-faire attitude that any DBA is as good as the next.

It's really getting kinda sickening. Somehow they think that their IT staff is so replacable that they can do anything to us they want and they can just go get another one. Well, I don't know about any of you guys, but I don't remember seeing any DBAs standing on the work wall at 7-11.

I really think that most of the problem is that companies still don't see the real benefit to putting the time in on their apps before they hit production. Most companies still just rush things together and test their apps under fire. They have the coders write the DB schema, and architect the entire solution. Well, I'm sure that reading a couple .Net books qualifies you as an expert in networks, storage platforms, DB schemas, indexing, etc. And until companies start to realize that all of these things can't be done by one person, and that they're all a lot harder than they sound, we won't get any real respect. See, once they make that leap, and start to finally see that these things not only matter, but they'd actually start listening to their DBAs and actually treat them like their valued members of the company with something very important to contribute.

Now, nothing has really spawned this post except me thinking about how trivial this new cert is going to be. If companies don't even see the need for this stuff, then our precious new cert certainly isn't going to mean anything to them. So basically, we're getting certs to impress other geeks at conferences. It's almost like we're displaying our Klingon ranks for each other to see.

And I know what you're thinking... I'm complete wrong and companies are really into architecting real solutions. Well, if that were true, then we wouldn't need to be compliance audits for basic IT processes. Hell, we have to fight companies for even an extra week to benchmark a new app, much less for the money to buy the benchmark software. It's pathetic. I realize that it's a pain in the ass to have to hold off on your deployment for something as worthless as benchmarking, but you're just gonna have to start sucking it up.

Anyway, that's all I've got.