Re: Network Operations Guide

[Deepak Jain <deepak () ai net>]

> My experience suggests to me that four hours of real, solid database
> design up front is worth approximately two weeks of re-engineering and
> compatibility development after about a year.  This is no
> exaggeration: the problems of badly normalized data are really bad

My god man, that's crazy talk. Planning ahead? Designing for growth? If 
we did that, what would Operations people do except check off fields in 
this "toolset" you propose thinking about before implementation!?! 
Reducing TCO and improving uptimes. Madness, I say.

:_)

To be useful, someone in the organization needs to sit down with the 
hired designer and describe what kind of data needs to be kept, what 
kind of questions the business needs demand answers for ("How many 
available /24s do we have? How many /30s? How long has it been since 50% 
of our customer base has had its contact information verified?) If you 
follow Alice down this rabbit hole, you will eliminate 95% (or more) of 
your operational and communications problems -- irrespective of how you 
store the data. If you combine that with ILM (Information Lifetime 
Management) of this knowledge, you could be at high 90s for several 
years at a time before needing to plumb entropy.

DJ