( after 16 years worked with oracle and 11 years with sqlserver)
My Litle suggestions to add to sqlserver scripts

1.adam machanic Who is active (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/archive/2012/03/22/released-who-is-active-v11-11.aspx)
2. Michelle Ufford db_index_defrag (Marvelous )
3.Brent Ozar ( Find Indexes Not used) http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Find_Indexes_Not_In_Use
4.Grant Fritchey (Scary DBA) ( https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/custom-metrics-for-monitoring-database-mirroring/)

Very useful tool
Performance Dashboard Reports (Microsoft 2005,2008,2012)
SQLNexus (Microsfot) the reports are amazing

Oracle
1. tanel poder snaper ( Brilliant ) (http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-scripts-and-tools/session-snapper)
2. Randolf Geist’s Extended DISPLAY_CURSOR (http://oracle-randolf.blogspot.com/2011/12/extended-displaycursor-with-rowsource.html)
3. Kerry Osborne (Thank you teacher ) create and fix sql_profile.
4.NORBERT DEBES asm hidden parameters

My favorite tool
sqlplus and Mumbai

But more to your point about what schools are teaching. They need to teach the basics, so the kids can succeed in college, where they will be half-assedly taught to think. Then with some years experience in the real world, they can progress on with their careers.

They should _not_ be expected to teach advanced computing algorithms or the latest bright and shiny API. Even for kids who could handle such things, by the time they get to the workforce, it will all be several generations removed.

Of course schools teach to the median and below students, they ought to do more for the top end of the tail. (Remember, I have a genius kid who’s in the newspaper, he’s so smart at STEM, while in a crappy school system). But they don’t – and an argument could be made they should remain egalitarian, as that maximizes scarce financial resources – so it’s up to the parents to take up the slack.

Our business changes so rapidly on the technical side I don’t think schools should teach much about it at all. I mean, do you really think they should require Word over Open Office? (You can guess I’ve had issues there… grrr…) The business and social side of our work, well to me anyways, I haven’t seen much change in decades. Really the only change is wifi in coffee shops leading to a subculture there, and perhaps technology incubators doing a similar thing with “virtual companies”, and I’m not yet convinced those are a long-term substantial change. Dilbert shines a light on issues that are eternal.

One thing our magnet middle school (where my second kid is) and the high schools have done that is different from back in the day (hey, does the term “new math” ring a bell?) is requiring collaborative projects. But that has a downside too, kids discover some other kids lack motivation and expect others to read the documentation and do their work for them… starting to sound familiar? ( https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2530781&tstart=0 )

Letting people discover things on their own can work wonders, but without a substantial framework and context it can lead to all sorts of bizarro behaviors. I know I got some strange ideas about how Oracle works by figuring things out on my own (after years of experience on other relational databases) – some turned out to be deep insights, even to the point of figuring out certain classes of problems better than highly trained consultants, and some were just plain wrong. And most were half-right.

You can make a difference at your kids schools. But you have to remember it is a government bureaucracy, with all that implies. Become buddies with the good teachers and the management, and always give them a fatal choice with only positive branches. PTA’s tend to attract control-freak helicopters, but you still have to work with them too. This is where all your experience dealing with unrealistic customers and management can really pay off.

Never underestimate the power of after-school and weekend groups too.

But seriously, it was a few months to design and build the answer to that problem, but in the meantime, they went “Oh, someone actually understands this odd tech stack.”

Some projects are a lost cause though. Sometimes you have to see that and say “no.” Usually it’s because they won’t listen to advice like yours.

In the olden days, it was simple. You designed the output, you designed the input, then you designed how to get from one to the other with limited resources. There were various religions about how exactly to go about this, but they all would be pretty expensive. People would make systems to make systems, recognizing that compute and storage was becoming cheaper, but labor was still expensive. So dealing with that led to various ways to make labor less expensive, with less than stellar results. Eventually, odd defacto standards would come out based more on platforms and religions sold than any rational thing like relational algebra. And here we are, trying to convince people that Excel spreadsheets aren’t the best data entry or display mechanism.

In the end, the magic comes from anticipating what is needed when and where.

Keep up the good work!

Kind regards
Uwe