I've worked for major retailers, database warehouses, and video game devs. Wide breadth of experience with databases covering lots of technologies. Would love to find a great company to stick with for years to come!
Every Dollar Tree and Family Dollar that I've been in (and this applies to Dollar General as well, here in the southern US) has had 1, maybe 2, employees working and aisles filled with boxes waiting to be unloaded. A couple employees can't contain any sort of theft, much less help customers and unload all the stuff to put on shelves.
Little reason to be shocked on why their business model isn't working...
I work primarily with Teradata, and prefer Toad over DBeaver. I've tried to use DBeaver but for some reason when creating objects or performing DML, it looks like the command successfully completed when it actually did not. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong...
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say, a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be done easily and fast with a database?
Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved or something.
The problem with traceability systems comes down to interfacing between the various nodes. Interoperability is probably the largest obstacle on the road to provide a full farm-to-table product tracking.
Probably not so much of a problem for the fully vertically integrated companies - especially those that also build or control their electronic systems, but large parts of agriculture still consists of independent actors on each node.
IIRC, the argument was that blockchain does not explicitly "solve" the problem, but rather that interoperability between blockchain-based systems will be easier than between those using completely different standards.
And of course, then you have the problem that food can travel around the globe many times before ending up on the table. Which again means more trust.
A database works if you have a central authority that manages it and accepts inputs. I’m going to switch to a different animal for a better perspective.
In the Pacific, tuna is caught within the EEZ of a number of (mostly) poor island nations. Some boats are part of the national fleet, but most are foreign flagged. The privilege to fish in an EEZ is costly, so there are a number of measures used to ensure that there is no cheating. The boat owners keep records, there are third party observers on board, and vessels broadcast positions. You need to cross check all these records, and do it in an environment without broadband.
To make things more complicated, there are incentives between countries. Fishing days are a finite resource governed by treaties. Poor countries have an incentive to oversell, and it’s possible to look the other way within an EEZ sometimes. Not only that, but countries have legitimate reasons for not broadcasting anything but gross yields from their EEZ.
All of this means that there’s not one central authority that can provide a single database.
I was 6 years old, 7 or 8 years away from acquiring a Commodore 64 and typing out my first code in BASIC from the back pages of a Compute! magazine... I'm an old man.
Hah, not quite nowadays but I, too, was dealing with one from around '97-2000'ish. What a pain in the ass. That was just one network in the building, I also had to deal with 10base-t, which was also a nightmare. shudder
I've been in the IT job market since 1995-ish, and have worked for a lot of companies, both big and large. In all my experience with interviews, I've only had one that was a rude disaster.
It was for a DBA position with a small team at a major insurance company. It was a team of 2 that wanted a 3rd experienced Oracle DBA to help them expand. Sounded good. Interview starts with those 2 guys, and immediately it was readily apparent that one of them had no real intention to hire someone, at least not me. Within 5 minutes, the shithead one had laughed out loud when I said I didn't have much experience with a certain part of Oracle. Any Oracle DBA out there knows that the product is f'ing PACKED with stuff, lots of it you won't use because you are in a certain segment (i.e. - in a data warehouse environment, you use certain tools but not others, etc).
I just sat there, staring at him. The other guy at least had the courtesy to turn red-faced. I know a lot of posts here say to just thank them and walk out, but I was so shocked I just sat there. The rude asshole never asked another question, and finally the nice guy escorted me out. He left me at the door with a "We'll be in touch." and I just chuckled and thanked him.
I've worked over 20 years as a DBA, mainly Oracle but also with Netezza, Teradata, Postgres, MS SQL Server, DB2, and Mongo. I would say DBAs are still in demand. I recently was laid off from a place that wanted to outsource DBAs and it took next to no time to find my new job. The pay is stellar, imo.
Having said all that, I could see it would be hard to decide right now, as a new IT person, to get into being a DBA. We wear so many hats, and are generally looked to for anything that needs to be done. As others have stated, a lot of companies don't seem to care that their queries are absolute shit, they just throw more hardware at the issue.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Teradata, Oracle, MS SQL (25+ years of database administration experience across these)
Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eHmw2XvXnujfhAGKddqZo_QO...
Email: nathan.gillmore@gmail.com