I inherited my dad’s penchant for tools. He frequently came home after work with a new screw driver or ratchet. He used baby food jars to organize excess nuts and bolts left over from projects past. I too, buy tools, sometimes ones I may not need immediately, but I *know* will come in handy at some point.
On the other hand, one of my favorite Saturday morning past times is watching the “The New Yankee Workshop”, with Norm Abram. One of my favorite all time episodes involved him spending over half the time building “jigs” to assist in the construction of the actual project. For those that don’t know what that is, it may involve building a special stand out of 2×4’s to support one end of a long table while a special cut is made. I have long thought attention to details such as this are what separate weekend warriors (such as yours truly) from master carpenters.
It occurred to me that systems management is not really much different. I have found myself to be a tool collector here as well. Tools in this context could include any of the following:
- Development languages
- Hardware
- Software tools found for download on the internet
- URL’s with how-to guides (Much like some of those found on this site)
DBA’s find themselves in two camps.
- DBA 2.0 which uses tools such as SQL Enterprise Manager, or Oracle Grid Control
- Hard core scripter who prefers the “do it yourself”
I do both, and I think you have to. The old adage is “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” As soon as AWR came out, I began to tear apart the DBA_HIST views and would troubleshoot every problem by querying them. I noticed other DBA’s using Grid Control. Sometimes they got more information than I did, sometimes less. Regardless, I found that old line scripting would not suffice, but neither would DBA 2.0.