Thursday, May 08, 2008

Spoil your users

It happens sometimes when things just don't go as planned. One of the things I always do is to make sure that things I may need in a hurry are ready. Restores are just that kinda thing. I go out of my way to make sure that for any given box, I can access complete restores within just a few secs. I'm using LiteSpeed, so I've written my own code that will create a list of restore statements for me based off of the last full backup and all the logs since then. And I can produce hundreds of lines of restore code in just about 5secs, including opening the script.

Well, it happened today. My first restore in a while, and it happened to be on a box where the LiteSpeed process had stopped logging to the central repo so I didn't have my usual list of backups to use to create my statements. So there I was building statements by hand, which wasn't too hard because I got lucky and they only needed a few. Then about 15mins later, the manager of that group came up to me and said that I had forgotten to send the email that the restore was done. When I told him that it was because I hadn't started it yet, he was like WHAT? What's taking so long, this kinda thing only takes a couple mins usually.

And that's what you want to hear. You want your users to get spoiled to getting these kinds of things fast. I've since fixed my LiteSpeed glitch and the next time he'll be good to go. But I love it when stuff like this happens because it means I'm doing a good job and the users have come to count on me being reliable and fast.

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About Me

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Sean McCown
I am a Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine, and a frequent contributor to SQLServerCentral.com as well as SSWUG.org. I live with my wife and 3 kids, and have practiced and taught Kenpo for 22yrs now.
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