What Counts For A DBA: ESP
- by Louis Davidson
Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect. At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement. This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.) Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work.
I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day. Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again. While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus. I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number.
This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice. Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog. But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name. These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem
This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld. Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.
