Blog Archives

Are you the kind of person who takes your car to the shop and tells the mechanic exactly what part needs to be replaced or fixed?  Do you go to the doctor’s office and let them know about your condition and probable cures based on what you looked up on WebMD?

How about others’ interaction with you?  In your professional life, have you been asked to do something very specific without context?  Does it make you uncomfortable?  Do you ever think, “Man, I just wish I knew what this was all about?” Read the full article…

Question for all IT support professionals:

Ever hear, “The system is down!” when what they mean is, “I got an error,” or “I can’t log in.”

How about, “This report doesn’t work!” when what they mean is, “I’m not getting the data I expected.”

Working with servers and software all day every day, it’s easy to forget that customers don’t know as much about the technology you support as you do.  Sure, you KNOW this is true, but after a while every support engineer, DBA, or whoever starts to roll their eyes at the 500th time a user asks for a password reset because they locked themselves out.  When that happens, before you say or write something even a little bit snarky, it’s important to remember something… Read the full article…

Every once in a while I run into a customer with a very specific request:  Please do “this” down to the very last detail.  I might take a look at the request and think, “Hmmm… I don’t know what they’re trying to do, but this doesn’t look like a good idea on the surface.  I wonder what’s up.”

For example, I once had an Oracle customer log a ticket asking me to run the SQL statement:  ”alter database character set…”  If you know anything about Oracle you know that changing the database character set isn’t a SQL statement, it’s a huge, nasty project. Read the full article…

Many of our customers have internal database administrators.  FACT:  Any remote DBA organization, and I mean ANY one of them, should be excited to work with a talented on-site person.  Without fail, collaboration between solid, focused technical people makes better use of existing talent and finds better solutions faster.  Every time.

That being said, how do you find a good DBA?  For that matter, how do we at Blue Gecko find good DBAs?  It’s not easy, but here are a few tips for anyone hiring an Oracle DBA.  Follow these guidelines and your chances of finding a solid resource will improve:

Read the full article…

When our daughter was about 2, my wife and I noticed she had become almost disturbingly attached to a particular blanket.  She carried it everywhere and slept with it every night; they were inseparable.  There was nothing remarkable about the blanket, except that if Daniella (our daughter) couldn’t find it she would melt down like a popsicle on the sun.  Being reasonably intelligent people who valued the few moments of peace and quiet possible with a 2-year-old (i.e. when they are sleeping) we made a bold move that turned out to be one of our most brilliant parenting decisions ever:

We cut the blanket in half. Read the full article…

We all know proactive service when we see it.  A couple of examples:

Proactive is when you are shopping for a new gadget, but just before you buy it the clerk tells you a special battery is required (even though the box fails to mention it) but is not included.  “Would you like one of those as well?”

Proactive is a waiter asking his patrons if anyone has any food allergies so they can instruct the chef to alter a recipe.   Read the full article…

As a remote services provider, often we are often asked to provide proactive maintenance support for clients.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to separate operational support form maintenance support.

Operational support surrounds management of the application operations, as they exist.  For example, if I’m running 11.5.10.2 on 10.2.0.3, operational support would include availability monitoring, capacity planning, backups, and other tasks that support the reliable operation of the existing system.  If I let patching slide, I can still provide operational support, but I’m not exactly maintaining the applications very well.  Maintenance is certainly a component of operations; if something breaks, you fix it, but break-fix maintenance certainly can’t be called proactive. Read the full article…

Blue Gecko has been mentioned in a great article on brands.

Sharpen Your Competitive Edge with Tangible Brand
by Mary Weisnewski
Consulting Magazine, October 30, 2008
Read the full article…