29 September 2009

Alice, This isn't Kansas

"Alice in Wonderland" gives us a wonderful quote, from Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

What that has to do with today's musing is thus, I still would rather do databases for money than trade biotech stocks. So, I keep a baleful eye on various listings, looking for anything interesting. I generally only bother with titles as; Database Architect, Database Designer, and DBA (this is the catchall title which sometimes is more than doing backups).

Here's a position with the title, Database Architect for Nokia (Boston area office). I'll leave the curious to venture there, at their peril. Now, I would expect (devilish imp that I am) that a company the size and sophistication of Nokia would have a clue about data and databases. I eagerly surfed to the listing, only to find (among other silliness) the following:

Domain expert in MySQL design and development

Familiarity with Hadoop/Pig/HBase and MapReduce/Sawzall/Bigtable desirable


I'll send along a resume just for shits and grins, but for pity's sake. This isn't a Database Architect. It's an application coder. Gawd darn it.

1 comment:

Roboprog said...

I hear you on the MySQL craziness. While that DB has gotten better (sucks less) over the last decade. It's biggest draw seemed to be that it was a free DB that ran on Windows, and tolerated SQL *syntax* (which I've not always loved, FWIW).

I've wondered, otherwise, why anyone would use a database that didn't think it was important (at first) to support "rollback", isolation or referential integrity. Might as well just use dBASE :-) I know MySQL does those things now, but PostgreSQL has for many years, and is also free. Of course, since they went for "duct tape" simplicity, psql only worked on Unix until recently, using forked processes instead of threading insanity.

But back to your main point, I shiver when I see organizations using MySQL, and suspect there's a few screws missing.