Human Interactions and especially those with people living remote are difficult for sure. It is not the first time I recognise, but it’s never a harm to internalize that again.

As it looks I have a talent in raising trouble. Sure it is no intention and very often it is my very wired sense of humor others don’t get, but from time to time I really have to tell myself to slow down and see things a bit more relaxed or … serious!

Perhaps matching to that I found some saying this morning:

"All problems of mankind have their reason in their missing ability to sit alone and still in a room"   Blaise Pascal

By god, this is worth to think about that!

This weekend while checking my emails I found some email conversation on a list … one, a real software bug buster had one of this "golden" issues (a million others don’t have) and a second one shouting for to see the source code (of a program which was given and not really written by the other one).

Getting the point far way quicker then them I started my reply whith the question "Are you both on drugs?!" …. Sure some joke on the edge. But could I have been really aware in the first one making it his pleasure to prototype and bug test a software and the other one is directly happy in helping out a complete team of developers to correct their issues and therefore asking for the most recent source code to rework it for them?

Yeah, I know … I’m doing it again! But honestly, without that bit of spicy conversation interaction does not make fun … at least not to me. But perhaps it’s better to do that with friends only in future.

I’ve never said or claimed for me, I’m easy …. when I left my room once ….

Recently I got involved into some application performance problem. Now it’s funny to hear how sure everybody is when it comes to performance issues that it is not the application and the programming itself.

Everything was checked twice, nothing had been changed since ages and the application part in question did always work reliable …. What to do?

Sure, it must be an database issue and the dba is in charge to solve solve the problem by tweaking the db and therewith rescue the world for all.

Hmmmmm …. ok with everybody that sure I first kept my mouth shut, logged in into the system and checked the cpu and memory usage.  A cpu usage of 37% on a stable level over a longer period of time, a database server process consuming 1,6GB of memory …. really not an all day thingy.

So I asked the developers what the application would do there right now?! Nothing specific they said! Running a  simple query  which usually completes within milliseconds. Ah .. ok …. but it didn’t look that was it would complete in milliseconds right now.

Ok then, having some point to start with I picked up the query, had a look at the tables , substituted the bind variables with values they gave me, did run the query and asked the database for the execution plan … All fine!!

So I finally I had the idea to simply count the variance and frequence of the stored primary key attributes.

And see there with the right value used within the where clause chosen for filling the bind variables  the whole execution plan changed! No index where used anymore  and a full table scan was performed!

Someone should really know about his or her data stored within the db and it not …. remember some simple mathematic operations which even the database will do for you!

I left as quiet as I came, as for it was anyway very calm in the room ….