This is a continuation of my DBA in Space journal.

As the previous episode was the climax, this final episode is the denouement of the series. It starts out with the real Brad welcoming the audience to episode two of DBA in Space at the Lunar Surface Exhibit of the Roddenberry Launch Center. Of course real Brad has been in stasis for the past month, and hasn’t yet realized that any time has past, so Miss Friday has to tell him it’s really the last episode. This seems to distress real Brad, but he knows what will cheer him up, Jar Jar. So real Brad begins to look for Jar Jar around the set. Miss Friday doesn’t want to surprise real Brad too soon about Jar Jar’s demise, so she changes the topic and directs a message to the audience, recapping her experience of forcing an alien hoard to retreat, a slight exaggeration, but she wants to impress his boss over at the NSCC. Brad is really confused after hearing Miss Friday talk about aliens, as he still doesn’t understand what is going on. In fact, real Brad decides he might be better off not knowing what really happened.

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This is a continuation of my DBA in Space journal.

While there are fourteen episodes, this episode was the climax of the two subplots. It was also a complex episode with many different scenes. We learn right away that Miss Friday is alive and locked in the IT storage room. It is dark and she is talking into a hand held video camera in order to document her situation for her superiors at the NSDD. In the initial scene, she appears to be trying to communicate with someone from the outside, but with no luck. Suddenly, she realizes that someone (the audience) can see her and she tells the audience that she is in a locked room, but apparently alien Brad has fiddled with the password and she can’t get out.

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Judging any contest is difficult, as you want to be as fair as possible. So coming up with the final 15 contestants for the DBA in Space competition was not an easy job for the judges. But as you have probably already learned today, they have made their decision, and the final 15 will go before a vote of the public to decide which lucky DBA will have an opportunity to fly into space.

Red Gate Software invited three people to be the judges, which included Simon Galbraith (Joint CEO of Red Gate Software), Buck Woody (well known DBA and former NASA employee), and Graham Coxon, an (English singer-songwriter whose former band, Blur, were responsible for composing the call signal for the Beagle 2 mission to Mars in 2003).

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Today, the final 15 competitors were announced at the DBA in Space website. To get into the final 15, the contestants first had to successfully answer all 14 tasks and questions from the competition, and then submit what would be their first Tweet from space. According to the rules, the Tweet had to be 140 characters or less and include the #redgate hashtag. Assuming they got this far, the Tweets that met this criteria where then judged based on the following criteria: (a) relevance to the database administrator community; (b) how innovate the Tweet is; and 3) relevance to the theme of space.

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This is a continuation of my DBA in Space journal.

As this scene starts on Lunar Exhibition set, Miss Friday is nowhere to be found, and alien Brad asks question twelve of the competition. As you can see, alien Brad really looks bad. His face is completely covered with boils, as if the skin were ready to slide off his interior Martian body. In fact, he has given up trying to pretend to be the real Brad, as he now assumes, as we learned from the last episode, that he knows that we know he is an alien. Because of this, he reveals personal information about himself on Mars. In fact, he reverts to his Martian ways, with a deep voice, anger in his face, and lizard-like eyes, when he says, “But if you don’t play along, you won’t make it to the launch.” He is telling the audience that if they don’t participate in the competition, that you can’t win. An obvious statement, but one that is very true. I imagine a lot of DBAs probably didn’t participate in the contest as they assumed that they could not win. But of course, one DBA will.

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This is a continuation of my DBA in Space journal.

This was a Friday task-related question and involves two key scenes. First, in what appears to be a video from a dead Miss Friday (aka Verity Blunt). She is asking you for your help to find the footage of the alien making the transmission she had recorded before her untimely demise. After you perform your task, then a new scene is show where alien Brad appears to be in a server room, and then jacks himself into a computer, apparently trying to upload the SQL Source Control software and database back to his dad back on Mars. This is the footage that Miss Friday wanted you to find. As you may notice at the end of this scene, alien Brad notices the webcam, and then you see the menacing message on the screen: “Your attempts to stop me are in vain. Cease your interference unless you want to be reunited with Agent Friday”. Apparently, alien Brad knows that you are watching. Also, can you be sure that alien Brad succeeded in uploading the software and database so that his father would help him return home?

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