Sometimes I feel like I behave like a simple CBO. I'm about to go home, driving from Austin to Houston. So in my mind I'm already building an execution plan:
- don't have enough fuel to get home, so
- i'll stop in Brenham at the Shell gas station
- get fuel
- if busy, move my car to parking spot
- go to restroom
- go to McDonald's to get a milkshake
- ready to make the rest of the trip home without another stop
I do this a lot. I'm wondering, am I weird or is it just a by-product of being in this business too long (or both)? When I got married, in the beginning I would get a bit irritated when my wife and I would have to do some spontaneous shopping. For example, we would be on our way home, and my wife would say "we need some milk, let's get some at Heb". This would cause me to build the execution plan for getting milk:
- walk to back of store where milk is
- get milk (vitamin D added)
- get in line at check-out
- pay and go home
Simple, fast and effective. But regularly my wife would invalidate this carefully constructed plan: "We're here anyway, let's also get some veggies/meat/whatever". Yikes! Not good! You said we we're getting milk, not get groceries (a totally different plan)! Luckily, I've adapted to that. I now allow for the variation in the plan. When we go into a supermarket, I just get a shopping cart by default...
Happy New Year to everybody!
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3 comments:
No, you're not alone, Jan.
I've had my share of those. Just recently, I've been working a *lot* with regular expressions. I think the thought process almost took over my entire brain such that I could see regular expressions in almost anything. For example, if I see a group of people, I could somehow "fit" them all in a regular expression. Their height, nationality, names, etc... I could express them in a regular expression.
Weird? Or is it scary?
:)
Ehhh, I guess I'm not the right person to judge ;-)
I think everybody is an optimizer in one way or another. If we weren't, we'd likely be in big trouble. I think it's just easier for those of us "in the business", as you say, to make what we do every day an analogy for a defined thing we are familiar with. I just wish the Oracle optimizer was as "smart" as the human optimizer!
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