Letting go

March 21st, 2007 by Peter Scott

If there is a geek gene I have almost certainly inherited it from both of my parents. On balance this probably a good thing to have (at my age, if not necessarily when a teenager) and I have adapted my lifestyle to cope with it. But one thing that I struggle with is the ability the ability to delegate technical tasks properly. Don’t get me wrong on this, I do delegate, especially if it is service level reporting, but anything that is remotely technical and a challenge to my colleagues and there I am rolling up the sleeves and sticking in my snout if you forgive the mixed metaphor.

This week has been good for letting go - I recruited a new DBA to take local management of a site based team I have working for me. And I stepped back completely from an OWB upgrade (9.2 to 10.2). The upgrade was a particular challenge to my sitting on hands skills - my colleague works just a few desks away from me so I knew how he was getting on, and the odd problem with getting legacy maps to work with our third-party Unix scheduler. But all is working well enough to give everything a thorough test and plan a similar upgrade on a mission critical data warehouse (if data warehouses are ever deemed mission critical)

Still, stepping back has given me the chance to think about a couple of presentations I am thinking of writing - in part they stem from a conversation with Peter Robson in Edinburgh last week, and in part from a conversation last May with Mark Rittman. The hard thing is to choose a level to speak at - that is a level of prior knowledge and not volume. I enjoy demystifying the work I do, especially around summary management. So an option is to give a general introduction to something such as materialized view query rewrite - or I could go more technical and do some performance metrics on group by rollup against individual summaries. But then would an audience want to listen to that?

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Comments

  1. joel garry Says:

    March 21st, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    I think there is value-add to going beyond the basics that everyone else can do as parrots, in a conference environment. I personally prefer more technical metrics.

    Of course, it depends on your audience. If you are trying to sell BI to a bunch of management types… well, that’s not me. Other’s mileage may vary.