Edit: Winner announcement!!!
I'm not going to lie to you Marge: This is the most fun I've had on the internet in years. I'm speaking, of course, about the SQL Server Musical Constest. I asked for some creativity, and you guys really ponied up. My absolute favorites, and therefore the finalists, are:
Annie Get Your Execution Plan (Annie Get Your Gun) – Tomboy Annie (played by Kimberley L. Tripp) can compose t-sql and generate perfect execution plans as easily as she can walk, making life difficult for Frank (played by Paul Randal). Their rendition of "Any Plan You Can Do, I Can Do Better" reached number one on the charts.
A StreetVARCHAR Named Desire – Blanche DuBois, an attractive southern belle (portrayed by Jessica M. Moss), is trying to design a streetcar operations database. Unfortunately Blanche isn't completely familiar with SQL datatypes, and creates all text fields as CHAR(255). She meets master DBA Stanley Kowalski (played by Marlon BrentO) who schools her in the ways of proper table design. In the final scene, Blanche admits that "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
ShowFLOAT – One of Oscar Hammerstein's lesser-known works about a young aspiring DBA trying update tables with numeric values greater than 10^38. Through the help of the Twitter community, he gets in touch with many experienced DBAs and learns that at the expense of precision, the FLOAT type will give him the range he needs. Musical Numbers include: – Ol' Man Randal – Can't Help Lovin' Dat Merge
Ghost Cleanup of the Opera – Some little known process tries to process block some other dude because they like the same spid. Classic tale.
Wicked – While the world knows DBA's as cruel, maladjusted individuals this heartwarming story tells us how it REALLY is and how we're really misunderstood, loving, maladjusted individuals…with a taste for bacon. Guest performance by Buck Woody as he shows how he's "Defying Gravity" via massive consumption of caffeine.
Best Little DataWarehouse in Texas. Story about running a SQL datawarehouse with no official licensing. With Bucky Woody as Melvin Thorpe the meddling TV reporter and @BrentO playing the part Dolly Parton would later capture in the movie version (you know why).
Phantom Reads Of The Opera – A dramatic production focusing on Christine Daees, a young business analyst straight out of college, who struggles to get reports from SQL Server using her companies third party BI tools. Constant blocking issues plague her until a resourceful DBA comes to her aid adding nolock hints to all of her queries, getting her results quickly….only later does she realize that all her work is for naught as uncommitted data shows in all the reports presented to management. Christine becoming another victim to the Phantom Reads. I think that a nice addition to the musical would be the inclusion of the classic Roxette hit "You've got the lock".
spidALOT: Join Sr. DBA Arthur, Brave Dev Robin, SQLAgentman The Enchanter (Some call him "TIM!"), fellow DBA Grantalot, and their brave Pages as they are sent on a quest by MANAGEMENT to find out why performance is so slow on their servers. Along the way they meet Engineers with HUGE TRACTS OF SAN, Monitoring Vendors attempting to distract them with sex, a Server Admin who calls himself "Teh Black Knight" who refuses to take any advice offered by the DBA, and a killer bunny owned by the nocturnal Mr. Denny.
LEFT JOIN Story – Set in New York City in the mid-1950s, the musical explores the rivalry between the Dweebs and the Dorks, two teenage DBA gangs of different RDBMS backgrounds. The members of the Dorks are huge proponents of natural keys and are taunted by the Dweebs, a group of MCDBAs who much prefer surrogates.
I realize I didn't include the author names; this is on purpose. I'm still deciding, so I want to be as impartial as I can and forget names. You can see ALL the submissions and who wrote them on the original thread. Winner will be announced today, promise.
Edit: I lied, I'm announcing the winner tomorrow instead. But today is tomorrow, so….the winner is:
Tim Ford @sqlagentman, for spidALOT!!!
I couldn't help myself…I loved all the submissions, but this had the most effort, the most geek jokes, and the phrase "HUGE TRACTS OF SAN" which has made me laugh EVERY SINGLE TIME I READ IT! Great job, Tim! Thanks for playing guys…this was a lot of fun!
Happy days,
Jen McCown
http://www.MidnightDBA.com