What is it you do again?

Great question isn't it? And to be honest over the past 20 years I'm yet to find a definitive answer to it. It's much harder to answer to people outside of the industry but even for those within it can be a little challenging. Maybe the job title will clear things up a little.

Let's see, here are a few from the past 10 years in no particular order. Solution Architect, Technical Architect, Support Manager, Business Analyst, Consultant, Project Manager (apologies for the last but needs must sometimes). Just for laughs we could probably throw Report Writer, Management Accountant and Database Administrator into the mix but they were roles not titles. Guess the simplest way to explain what it is I really do is that the title could quite easily be Diversified Specialist.

Sounds like an oxymoron doesn't it, and it probably is. Although it's slightly better than how my daughter explains what I do to people, she gave up years ago and just started calling me a Computerist...and that's not even a real word but from her perspective dad does stuff with computers, no idea what it is, just stuff. By the way he does this stuff all over the world so he's probably pretty good at it. Or maybe I could run with the way a recent highly experienced CIO used to introduce me to other C-Level colleagues. 'This is Craig, he's a genius'. Now while wonderful for the ego, not to mention the added pressure which comes with that type of introduction, once again not really a job title. Much safer to go with Diversified Specialist.

Why am I telling you all this? Well I guess it's important to where this conversation goes next. Breaking up the new job title into it's elements the Specialist element is directed at System Performance, whereas the Diversified element is addressing the range of capabilities required to address said performance issues.

Let me explain.

I have a solution where the Database Server is encountering high levels of CPU usage over an extended period of time. This is an easy one, isn't it. CPU = Hardware so we'll get a Hardware Specialist in to look at the problem. Recommendation: Upgrade the Hardware, give it more CPU it obviously needs it.

Or do we look at it from another angle, it is the Database Server after all, lets get a Database Specialist in. (Yes, I know, generally called a DBA). This specialist finds that there is extensive blocking in the database and extended wait times. Easy fix, let's look into the indexing, maybe a few index rebuilds and make sure you get those statistics updated. Might want to also look at your MAXDOP value and some of the optional trace flags.

And to be honest, that might even work. Although it's addressing the symptoms, not the cause. Let's say it doesn't work, what do you do then? Well you could upgrade and assume all your problems will go away with the limitless resources available to you in the cloud.

Or you could look at this issue from the Diversified Specialist perspective.

It all starts with data, this is where the diversifications relating to Analysis and Reporting come into play. Not only do you need to extract data from multiple sources, in this case it's both hardware and database specific performance metrics. But you also need the capability to analyse it, to know what it all means. What causes a CPU wait, for example, but as we know CPU waits happen all the time so what's a bad number? Or for a Hyper Threaded Database Server is 100% CPU usage actually 70%. A database will always block and indexes will fragment, is this always a bad thing? Are statistics just a profile of the data and if so has the profile really changed? What is MAXDOP and what does it really do?

The benefits of diversification go beyond this though, now we start to look at the product not only from a technical level but how it is used. This is where Architecture (How the solution elements hang together?) and Consultancy (What are the processes being followed?) come into play.

As an example let's assume that we have a batch process which used to take 8 hours to run, meaning it could 'just' fit into the batch window. It now takes 2 days to complete. Beside this we have another batch process which used to take 2 hours to run and now takes 4 hours, this is run every night. The first batch is multi-threaded the second creates multiple jobs at execution point based on an interface. The first batch is dedicated to 2 batch servers with 24 allocated threads, the second is sharing with general batching (invoicing and the like) and has 4 batch servers also with 24 cores. Under peak load we find 144 batch requests simultaneously sent to the database, the Database Server has 80 virtual processors. That could cause both the high CPU usage and the blocking as mentioned earlier, maybe the hardware guy was right, let's throw some tin at it.

But peak load is not our real problem here, the database and server should be able to cope with this load much better than what it is currently doing. Let's channel another diversification to look into it. This time it's the Technical Architect and specifically the Code Developer. We'll throw a little bit of DBA into the mix as well.

Here we trace the process and review the code and what do we find? In one process 50% of time spent is retrieving a single common value from a static table, lets cache that so it goes to the database once, not 50,000 times. Another process has a long running query which claims to have a missing index, review shows an index close to requirements does exist so we change the order of the select statement to match the index. We also find that no criteria has been included in the long running batch since the issue started. Meaning that most of the additional 2 days can be attributed to looking up data which doesn't require processing. And just for fun we're sending task completion notifications to a service user account which is never looked at, let's turn them off.

We'll leave it there shall we. Hopefully you now have a better inkling of what a Diversified Specialist does while also recognising the cause of the performance issues may not be as obvious as they seem and that the rectification of the issue can require a number of quite diverse specialities.

I now know what to say at the next group session which requires an introduction as it's now loud and clear what I do:

Hello, my name's Craig and I'm a Diversified Specialist.