Mark Solda

Business Process Improvement • Strategy • Team Leadership • Teamwork • Conflict Resolution

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When I started to work for a financial software company, the development teams were broken up into the features of the application, e. g., portfolio, fixed income, interfaces, etc.  And while the company used Sybase as it relational database management system, it had no team devoted to database development or administration.  Each development team modified the database schema to meet their needs, often without considering database structure implications.  Database administration was done by the Systems Team, on which I had been hired as a system administrator (primarily to handle database administration tasks that the System's team leader wanted to get "off his plate."

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There was no central policy of database design within the company and this created performance and maintenance issues, most notably when attempting to modify the database schema to implement a new release.  I saw the solution to this to be to create another team, a hybrid team to handle database development and administration.  I pitched this to the partners and within about a month, there was a Database Team, with myself as team leader.  Three current employees were moved onto the team and one new employee was added.

 

Over the years, the Database Team standardized database development.  Existing standards for local database installations were also implemented.  Except for some simple pieces of code, all database code associated with database objects (e.g., triggers, stored procedures, etc.) eventually were rewritten, correcting errors, improving performance and readability.

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The centralized database development and administration created an environment of greater database design, development and administration knowledge within the company, which provided the knowledge base to make the Global Replication Porject and the ASP Environment possible helping the company grow.