My primary job focus is the design, deployment, maintenance, and support of infrastructure services like web, mail, dns, ntp, nfs, nis, ldap, print, and database servers (this is not to mention the routers and access points, sun rays, lab machines, beowulf clusters, etc that my group also maintains). However, recently I’ve been doing, well, some different stuff.
It’s a nice change of pace to have the opportunity to revisit the database *development* side of things. I know a lot of people feel like it’s the most mundane thing you could ever want to do, but you know what? Some people like sudoku. What is more mundane that sudoku? I submit that there is *nothing* more mundane than that, so I’m not really out of my mind to thoroughly enjoy the challenge of getting a small, neat, precise answer delivered to you from a veritable sea of bits after performing the proper keyboard incantation. Of course, that incantation can be difficult to come upon, and so it’s kind of like a weird form of ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ for only the most lazy of lazy people, which is why it’s perfect for sysadmins.
It’s also an opportunity for me to document some things for my website, and probably blog/rant about the decrepid state of database implementation by open source projects (probably at the O’Reilly SysAdmin blog).