My job title says “Production Support Engineer”. A manager from another team once quizzically asked, “How does your title connect to what you actually do here?”. I thought, the word “Engineer” must have come from the fact that I have a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer “Engineering”. The word “Production” must have been a result of the production databases that my reports connect to, and the word “Support” must have come from the fact that supporting the processes that generate these reports is a part of my job.
I work in the Database reporting team at Vonage. We support about 500+ perl/unix processes that connect to a wide variety of databases(Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Vertica) and provide our management data that is required for their key business decisions. Actually, we don’t just ‘support’ them. 90% of our time is spent in development of new reporting packages. The dev, testing and production of these packages is entirely handled by our team. Given that the data is in various locations, most reports that we design connect to multiple sources, perform background ETL using Perl and present the data to the end users in a seamless manner. Mostly we use Perl for cronned jobs. Nowadays, I use Pentaho’s ETL tool (PDI / Kettle) for expediting adhoc reports. My supervisor (Scott Macfawn) sometimes says…”Pentaho to the rescue”, and it’s true. The tool that you use doesn’t matter if your head is just about to roll. I’ve been recently trained on Ab Initio and Oracle BI EE too and will be using them in the near future.
Some one once told me, “All you do is embed SQL in Perl code”. What’s so hard about it? I smiled :). If a software developer writes bad code and releases it into production, the software might cause maybe one system to crash. The next patch can fix it. On the other hand, if I write bad code and push it into production, a database might come crashing down, affecting the millions of phone customers that we have. Usually I touch (or should I say hit?) multiple production databases, so the effects can be disastrous. Code and resource optimization become critical.
Each day is different. Some pass along smoothly. Others are roller-costers with cases escalating very quickly to senior management about report requests submitted today but were needed to be completed and released into production yesterday. I get to talk to senior management and work with them on their report requests. Most people live their lives in cubicles, completely unnoticed. I am glad, I don’t. There’s a level of confidence that comes with knowing that your work gets converted into action. It makes work, well more interesting.
A new dimension 