Dealing with performance issues is always dragging. Now being called as an expert and pleased to join a workshop about advising and solving performance issues is much more "delicate".

Mostly you don’t know all people in advance and the application itself is something totally new. The customers is already upset and grumpy and very often another "expert" has already tried to advise. So preparing for such an workshop always does consume a lot of time. Time you need to get confident about things first. And for sure time to find things not working proper or at least suboptimal to have something back in case no one else … has something to say!

So next week I will head into such a workshop and last few days I did deeply dig a database and did try to find out about the problems this customer is dealing with. Tiring for sure! But also interesting on the other side.

As mentioned you know nothing about the application. You just have the database, their info and indicator and the incoming SQL as for to analyze. Now I haven’t done since a while, but now after investigation I’m once again impressed about what you can find out about …. when you look at things first.

This people do really not know about coding and relational databases. They have quickly ported some "Access" & "Excel" crime soft project into a bigger environment and more users and now feel curious  about why it doesn’t perform as wished.

So from principle it is easy. I already see the way to the end of the tunnel were light does appear again …. Just …. Hm! …. How to tell it the customer without upsetting him immediately?

A few days ago I wrote about my different rates, which I have with intention. For Sure!!

Now today I had an interesting discussion with a customer again. He came with some application installation manual showing me a few pages coming directly behind the "Chapter Overview" and the "Pre-Installation Requisites" telling me about that all would be stuff, I would have to do for him …..

Sure I have a contract with him about database administration, but I smiled and said: Following the service agreement we both have agreed about earlier, this here is not included within the ongoing business of your database.

Just because the manual is telling you that you need an administrative access to the dbms system, it does not necessarily means every little sql script and it’s execution is automatically a "DBA" task for me.

Somewhat baffled, he asked me what then would be included into the contract we both have?! And I said that I’m pretty happy about doing all those things mentioned within our service agreement …. (perhaps he just has to read it again )

Anyway! Later on we agreed about it’s all additional effort I will charge based on time and material when it’s done and world seemed to be save and found again!

Nevertheless, Guess  I will never understand why people automatically assume it’s "all" included within the dba’s work – just because the 4 or 5 lines instruction about what to do for setting up a proggy is beyond their horizon. (Should I be more carefully with my postings here? Gulp )