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6 a.m.: Tony Howe, our intrepid DBA, arrives at Highmark.
6:10 a.m.: Gotta have coffee before jumping into the day's work.
9:45 a.m.: Tony works through his growing list of requests.
12:30 p.m.: Chocolate is a must to get through the day.
2 p.m.: Tony reviews the data and makes a plan to optimize use of the data warehouse.
3:30 p.m.: Time to head home, but that doesn't mean the workday is over.
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Making every day count
Highmark Inc.'s Tony Howe gives insight into the daily life of an (extra)ordinary Teradata DBA.
by Keith Ferrell
Ask a Teradata DBA to describe a typical day, and you'll soon discover there are no typical days. Once people throughout the company discover the power of the Teradata Warehouse, their enthusiasm begins to flow. Just ask Tony Howe.
"The business side keeps coming up with new questions, new approaches to the data, requests for new views," says Howe, DBA for Pennsylvania insurer Highmark Inc. "So there's a freshness to every day, a sense of, 'OK, that's what they want out of the box, so let's show them the best way to get it.' You never know what sort of request the next e-mail will bring."
So e-mail's the first action item when he arrives at 6 each morning, correct? Not quite. Howe begins each day with an act of compliance. Because Highmark deals with confidential medical records and patient information, all workstations must be logged off when their owners leave their desks, as required by The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Howe's
first act is to log his station back on. Then, he's ready for a typical—or atypical—day.
With the workstation up and running, Howe spends his first few minutes of work in command center mode, bringing up Teradata Administrator and Teradata Manager to check for any jobs that might be running; if it's a Monday he checks for any that were started over the weekend. Normally there aren't any holdovers, leaving Howe free to check the mainframe.
He then turns to the e-mails, including mail posted automatically from jobs or cycles that have been running in his absence. Highmark's two physically
separate corporate campuses guarantee a constant flow of communications to Howe's workstation. He sorts the e-mails quickly, identifying and attending to the urgent and priority requests, then organizing the rest in a tier ranked for appropriate action. That done, the day's work is at hand.
Taking time to train
"We're in the final phases of our transition to a true enterprise-wide data warehouse operation," Howe says. "A lot of my effort lately has been focused on
testing to make sure that the necessary changes to our data structures meet both the warehouse's operational requirements and the ongoing needs of the business users putting the data to work."
Highmark's close to 1,000 Teradata users get a fair amount of Howe's attention throughout the day, starting with e-mails and continuing through various meetings, one-on-ones and (of course) more e-mails.
"Once people started finding out just how flexible Teradata can be, they started thinking of new ways they could use information. More importantly, for them and for me, they started asking how they could use Teradata to generate special views of different information."
The requests often prompt Howe to give a respectful, affectionate chuckle; training the users consists primarily of showing them the Teradata ropes. "Basically I taught them not to be afraid to write any query they wanted and to scan for any information they needed," he explains. "In DB2, scanning is the kiss of death; with Teradata, it's a dream."
"They're fearless," Howe says, and he suggests that some of the business users may be better at writing SQL queries than their teacher. "We have power users who are creating monster SQLs that combine requests that used to take two weeks to generate from the mainframe into one table that lets the [Teradata] database do the work and gives them the view they need right away."
The business users' shift to and acceptance of Teradata has been impressive, as are the results. According to Howe, "Teradata—and the business users' abilities with it—has made that side of the company 20% more efficient."
Some days he spends as much as two hours teaching groups of users. Howe's training sessions walk employees through different aspects of the Teradata environment, introducing new applications and explaining their integration with the data warehouse, answering questions and offering insights. "But basically," he says, "I just focus on showing them what Teradata is and what it can do—and let them take it from there!"
Making time to learn
One of the reasons Howe is such a good teacher is that he's a dedicated student. "I love to learn, and I spend as much time adding to my skill set as possible," he says. His position requires that he put in a minimum of 30 hours of classroom time
a year, but Howe regularly exceeds that minimum. The way he sees it, the more he learns, the better the data warehouse runs and the more he's able to do for and share with Highmark's staff.
"Last year was a particularly busy study year—any year when there's a new release is a big learning year," Howe explains. "But there's always something to learn, something new to master." In fact, Howe attained Teradata Certified Master status in 2003.
Enjoying time to grow
Looking at the array of data warehouse tools and applications that are at his disposal, Howe can't help but think of earlier days. A Teradata DBA since 1991, Howe laughs when he remembers how things used to be.
"We did things the good old-fashioned way," he says, and sometimes that way was inefficient and difficult. Since the first release of DBA support tools, Teradata has continued to develop and refine applications to make the DBA's job of administering and monitoring platform performance easier. (See sidebar "A walk through Teradata's wizardry" for more on tools.)
Easier doesn't mean simplistic. While Howe has been freed from some of the day-to-day details of running the data warehouse, he still is responsible for a fair amount of monitoring, tuning, management and problem resolution. That is, of course, the DBA's job, and Howe enjoys the challenges that every day brings.
Because the company is in the final period of transitioning to a full enterprise data warehouse operation, Howe is involved in regular meetings to track progress, refine objectives and integrate new applications. As lead DBA, Howe plays a prominent role every Tuesday at 10 a.m. during the company's regular enterprise data warehouse meeting, where the technical staff thoroughly reviews current projects.
Other meetings also keep Howe busy. "Every two weeks we have a Performance and Tuning meeting. Since we added our four 5380 nodes earlier this year, performance hasn't been a problem," says Howe. Indeed, much of the focus in these meetings is now aimed at developing new approaches to standard reports. "I'm currently looking at using Index Wizard," Howe says of the new approach. With the EDW not yet opened to the user community the early establishment of efficient and effective reporting will go a long way toward smoothing the transition from the current EDW usage levels (1.4TB) to the expected 3TB of data.
In addition, disaster recovery plans are reviewed on a consistent and ongoing basis. Likewise, meetings and checklists precede quarterly releases of changes to Highmark's claims processing systems.
Howe believes that business users are starting to see the benefit a DBA can bring to the process. "(Business users)
definitely rely more on the DBA to play a larger role in the warehouse's operation within the business, not just its performance," he says. He is spending more time meeting with data modelers and programmers, laying out physical structure and indexes, and concentrating on improving performance and fine-tuning operations.
Howe appreciates the ongoing evolution of his role and the added responsibilities and challenges that this process brings. "Effective DBAs are more than implementers," he says, adding that by effectively using the Teradata Warehouse, business users understand the part DBAs play in controlling data as well as making the warehouse run properly.
It goes both ways. Business training (including formal business classes) is playing a larger part in Howe's schedule, and he believes it's important that he learn how Highmark's business operates, in addition to understanding the IT end of things.
Finding time to do more
Howe believes the Teradata Warehouse's operating efficiency makes tackling a broader range of challenges easier. "(Teradata is) doing it right. I don't have as much 'standard' DBA work with Teradata as with DB2, so I can use the (extra) time to try and understand the business side of the house. How do they plan to use the data? What types of questions will be asked abut the data? How can I make things better, either via indexes or actually re-writing the SQL?"
The requests keep coming, all day, every day, from the moment he powers up his workstation to the time he logs off at 3:30 each afternoon. Once Tony Howe completes that log-off, the day is done, right? Not necessarily. Sometimes, Howe has to address technical development and production issues after hours. Of course, that's part of the job. But thanks to ongoing Teradata developments, after-hours calls may soon be a thing of the past.
Keith Ferrell, former editor of OMNI, has written, spoken and consulted on governance and Web-enabled corporations.
© Teradata Magazine-June 2004
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