Hey my friend, I’m aware that the title of this post might make you smile or even lead your mind into a wrong direction!
But seriously you should not think bad now or even allow your mind to play up about.

What I’m talking here about is serious work and for example working together with a a lady on a common project!!

On Tuesday I was traveling together with even two IT expert ladies on a business trip heading to a workshop at customer side.  The background was a difficult one about tuning a database application which does no longer quick enough. And now looking back I have to say that especially that "mixed" teamwork made a big difference for sure. All day long during the workshop we enjoyed a pleasant, relaxed and winning atmosphere. And even we more or less told the customer that this application is "shit" and need an urgent redesign, we even laughed a lot making the one or other joke with them during our conversations.

For sure I do know and respect both ladies since years, what makes a difference! And they both are real experts in their areas of expertise. But they are also friendly, easy to deal and great team players as well. The time travelling with them was short and I once again recognised that I truly enjoy working in such a "mixed" environment.

Yeah yeah, I see you smiling now …. but once again I’m talking about serious work here!

Try it! Treat those ladies with respect and you will see … even and rarely a few of them might be really "natural blond", most of them are great dudettes, easy to work with and often working harder than men! Especially those I know and sometimes even call a friends of me.

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 ….