Because people are generally good.

I’m running into Db performance issues with an OTLP project I’m working on. Another developer and I have reached the end of our accumulated performance knowledge and seek out an individual to join the team to help us speed up our application.

For some background we’ve done schema changes to denormalize pieces of the data, optimized every query, ran multiple database tuning advisers to get our indexes just right, tuned MSSql’s server options.

We don’t need somebody to come in and tell us joins can be slow and what deadlocking is, we need somebody who knows what to do after exhausting all the steps listed above.

Anybody have any tips or experiences hiring OLTP DBA’s to share? What kind of questions can we ask the DBA during the interview process?

Its an odd situation to be in, we know we need somebody who knows more than the current team, but we don’t know what questions to ask because we don’t know what the next steps are. Does that make sense?

The Black Swan is a pretty good book for changing the way you think. Once you learn to suffer through the authors arrogance and self-promotion there are some real gems inside.

I’m working with XML that was designed by somebody who got paid by the level of nesting. The different xml files always looks something like this:

<Car>
   <Color>
       <Paint>
          <AnotherUselessTag>
               <SomeSemanticBs>
                   <TheImportantData>

With LINQ its easy to get what I want: ( not exactly, but you get the point )

from x in car.Descendants("x")
from y in x.Descendants("y")
from z in y.Descendants("z")
select z.WhatIWant();

I’m asking if there is a better way to do this? Some way of navigating the DOM with Linq?

Many to Many relationships aren’t supported in Linq2Sql.

There are a couple of workarounds:

http://www.iaingalloway.com/many-to-many-relationships-in-linq-to-sql

http://blogs.msdn.com/mitsu/archive/2008/03/19/how-to-implement-a-many-to-many-relationship-using-linq-to-sql-part-ii-add-remove-support.aspx

Weird that the picture of your db schema is the same as one of the articles…