TheMadDBA
Active Member
TL;DR version: Should we hold back intellectual property to avoid cutting ourselves out of work?
Just looking for some input from the community here... especially those that provide free tools/guides to the general public (Progress related mostly) and also do consulting in the same space as those tools.
When deciding to put information out there do you purposely limit what is freely available? I am considering publishing some of my tools/tricks for application performance tuning but I am not sure how much of that I want to disclose.
For example I have a tool that uses VSTs for table/index activity combined with dbanalys output and guesses which tables/indexes should be in which buffer pool, do they need to be moved to a new area,which tables are likely to have indexing issues based on number of reads compared to table size,etc. Of course it isn't perfect but it usually comes up with pretty good guesses assuming the sample size is large enough.
I also have similar tools for other common issues for application and DB performance. I personally use them to quickly identify issues when I inherit a new application or a s a framework to implement application caching and performance logging.
Of course none of these are going to replace a qualified person but at what point do you hold back on publishing tools that guide end users to fix common issues without having to call you in for help?
Just looking for some input from the community here... especially those that provide free tools/guides to the general public (Progress related mostly) and also do consulting in the same space as those tools.
When deciding to put information out there do you purposely limit what is freely available? I am considering publishing some of my tools/tricks for application performance tuning but I am not sure how much of that I want to disclose.
For example I have a tool that uses VSTs for table/index activity combined with dbanalys output and guesses which tables/indexes should be in which buffer pool, do they need to be moved to a new area,which tables are likely to have indexing issues based on number of reads compared to table size,etc. Of course it isn't perfect but it usually comes up with pretty good guesses assuming the sample size is large enough.
I also have similar tools for other common issues for application and DB performance. I personally use them to quickly identify issues when I inherit a new application or a s a framework to implement application caching and performance logging.
Of course none of these are going to replace a qualified person but at what point do you hold back on publishing tools that guide end users to fix common issues without having to call you in for help?