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My passion is designing and then working with, databases. At their best, a DBA or database architect/programmer’s career is about is the process of organization, usage, and protection of data assets.

But ai wonder how this translates to our personal lives. Data assets share a lot of similarity to any kind of organization. You make sure that you have a place for everything that you have, or intend to have. If it doesn’t work, you adjust it.

Is it inherited?

My dad worked for the Cherokee National Forest doing fleet managment and logistics.He was ridiculously organized in his career. He managed 100s of vehicles and their service/sales at their usability end/road signage/etc. He even worked on the Olympic Whitewater center over in Benton TN, doing logistics for getting it created.

He contracted a bacteria that they couldn’t find an answer for, and he passed away before the 96 games that were centered in Atlanta. There is a tree they planted in his honor there, and he received a lot of commendations for his work over the years.

Point being, he was professionally organized. It extended to his life too. After he passed, looking at his records he maintained might as well been electronic and managed by a team. Labeled, beautiful handwriting, everything meticulously organized.

You probably could have guessed he would be a professional at organization by seeing his home records and been right.

So probably not genetic?

If you came into my house and looked around at my house, you would find two things. 1. A lot of well organized stuff. 2. A lot of disorganized stuff. You would not be wrong to guess that I was in charge of the organized stuff, since my career and hobby passion is well designed databases.

You would be wrong. Looking at my personal life compared to my dad, you would have no clue we were related. Anything that is well organized in my house would be primarily the work of my lovely spouse. I may have helped her design a few things, but she would be by far the empetus for any organization in my home (and is something she works on constantly.

Ironically enough, while I was away getting the car serviced today, she was cleaning out shelves around the room my office is in!

What is wrong with organizing by piles?

Everything in my organization system is basically in short term organization (semi-stacked in a pile in reach of my desk) or stuffed in a drawer (I do have some general locations to stuff certain kinds of things, though I have been known to violate these rules since I can’t get the CHECK constraints to work on Ikea cubes).

When I need something, I basically can do a scan of everything, and at least eventually I find what I am after. Things are broken down mostly by type, but honestly, not always. So you might think that my organization skills are very weak. It isn’t as much skill as it is, motivation.

What is my motivation

So why is organizing data my passion? What I get out of it.

Organizing data is a lot more mathematical than physical stuff. Making changes to the organization of data in a relational database is relatively easy. I can change millions of invoices to a different format in 10 minutes. And if the new design doesn’t work, you can just do it again. Even better, you can back up one design and test another. If you don’t like it, you can revert to the old version.

My motivation for a well structured database is that it will work, serve the customer, both internal and external. As I have worked on a team of internal customers for many years of my life, the better the data, the easier it is to use.

When data is organized well, the external customer is happy because their data needs are served. And when internal customers can ask questions of their data and not have to spend countless hours trying to answer simple questions about how the external customers are behaving and how much value they are getting.

Why is this different?

Time saved. In a database system, you usually have lots of users. Data is used every day, thousands of times. Optimizing those types of access makes perfect sense to my brain.

This is very different than my occasional need to find a “weird cable that I know I put in a box maybe a few years ago”. If I use something frequently, I probably have made sure I know generally where things are. I know my main camera is either in my bag or its case (or on my desk, or my other desk, most likely).

In the physical world, there are no backups. Make a change, transform your current organization, move all the stuff, etc. Maybe the design works, maybe it doesn’t. But you can’t rollback the real world to a previous version. So it needs to be actually nearly perfect, unlike data in a database.

I tend to have similar problems with my non-relational digital assets too. My folders in Dropbox have thousands of pictures per trip, conference, and family events in a folder format that I have worked on so many times trying to get right. I have an okay organization, but once I have moved around 100000 pictures, I often start realizing a better way to organize things.

Codd designed relational databases to be divorced from all the internal stuff you might need to modify. You might have a file named “jIkeidkeid.file” but the way a relational database is built, you never see that. That file may have a single file format, or it could include lots and lots of different formats, even be stored in a different continent these days with the advent of the cloud.

I wish every bit of file storage was as easy to work with as a relational database. That layer of indirection that keeps you out of the raw data is so great. Organizing stuff usually means spreading t out into the many locations we have available, garage, storage unit, shelves… I am getting tired just thinking about how many different places we have stuff stored!

Summary

People are different. Just because you are good at a specific thing doesn’t mean you will or will not be good at a related skill. You need to look at the motivation as well. I am not motivated by organization itself, I am motivated strictly by doing things that save time.

Spending lots of time organizing things I likely never need doesn’t excite me. But creating a database system that saves everyone time… I will spend 40 hours a week working on that, and another 10-20 each week learning to do that better and sharing it with you.