Why Grumpy DBA?

People often ask me why I'm grumpy - well they don't actually - but that's probably because no-one likes talking to me because they think I'm grumpy.

I have been called other things, and of those that I can publish, one that I remember was "the Tourettes DBA". This title was coined by an old manager who did on occassion manage to wind me up a little - and there may have been one or two times when I pointed out that I disagreed with his opinion, or that his suggested course of action may not be the most beneficial method of solving the problem in hand.

The fact I "pointed out" this by shouting across an entire open plan office as he was about to march into the server room to reboot a server, and may have used a couple of "colourful" words, should in no way be used as evidence of grumpiness.

Good ways to make a DBA grumpy though are

• say you need access to a database, but not which server.
• tell them you can't access "the database". DBA's are of course mind readers and know exactly what every person in the entire company is working on, however these powers fade from time to time (usually due to lack of caffeine and/or alcohol).
• similarly don't tell him "my proc doesn't work" or "I can't access the table" 

Be careful or you may find your "friendly" DBA creates a database called "TheDatabase", populated with "MyProc" and "TheTable" and pedantically shows you that you can indeed access "TheDatabase", and "MyProc" does indeed run, and that you can access "TheTable" ... or maybe that was just me!!!

Generally though I'm not really that grumpy ... ask my kids.

Gits.