Zed Shaw wrote an article that I find to be both highly informative and deeply annoying. Zed discusses the failures of most programmers to properly analyze performance data. His insight into the matter is really quite enlightening. Of course, that's if you can stand to listen to him past the first paragraph.

Zed spends a lot of time talking about fucking and killing, but his girlish whine only leads me to believe he hasn't done a lot of either.

He gives an example of how understanding statistics has helped him save the day:

Then I hit the DB2 database and about crapped my pants. Almost all of the queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on average, but a 60 second standard deviation! This was the query. I made a chart of all the different queries, marched into a meeting, slapped them on the table and said, “It’s not the database, it’s IBM’s DB2 configuration. Here’s the time measurements to prove it.”

The next day we had IBM fixing the problem (turned out to be a single update index command) and we all kept our jobs. That’s what a proper analysis method can do for you.

Talk about confounding. Here's my analysis of what Zed did right and what Zed did that was wrong (or at least pointless):

Right:

1. Looked at the database logs and located the slow query.

Wrong:

1. Wasted time and paper making graphs and charts that did anything except sort the execution time of queries in descending order.
2. Slapped this handful of toilet paper on the table as if he'd done anything more than his job.

I mean seriously. Anyone who's administered a database (or any other bit of server software for that matter) will tell you that the very first thing you do when something goes wrong is check the logs. It doesn't take a PhD in rocket surgery to parse a log file looking for anomalies.

I also can't help but notice Zed didn't actually fix the problem. He just found someone to blame. I wonder if the IBM tech who actually fixed it wrote a big rant in his blog threatening to kill all programmers who can't add "a single index" to their databases.