Ntro’s Official Opinion

Monday was my first day at the new job, and so far it has been going well. The first couple of hours were spent setting up my computer and cubicle, taking the official office tour, and meeting people whose names and positions I don’t remember.

The next 15 minutes were a brief introduction to the data model, and an even more brief description of a query that has a severe performance issue. Apparently the query was the result of a last-minute requirement last Friday, and hadn’t really been tuned yet. After lunch, I took at look at the query, which was actually a function which queried a view which executed another function which queried another view which . . . I didn’t get that far. After sifting through the source for a while, I found part of the problem and improved the performance of the query by a couple hundred percent.

This is nothing to brag about, really. No one was stumped by the issue, because no one had taken time to analyze it, and any of the other developers would have been able to discover the problem if given the chance. But, the chance was given to me, and I was able to work with it and be productive, something I didn’t expect to do on my first day. This made its way up to my boss’ boss’ boss, which earned me a few pats on the back that afternoon. That was nice.

Other than that, I’m working on the Oracle DBA transition. More on (pun intended) that in a future post.