Instead of working, I blog.

I recently ran across a perfectly delicious situation I wanted to share with you.  Someone actually wrote to tell me about this.  He just started a new gig and there was massive corruption in one of the dev DBs.  He went to ask the DBA where the backup was and he got a very snotty reply. 

Well, as it turns out this was something that the DBA had gone around and around with them about.  See, the devs didn’t want the DBA to do anything on their precious box so they refused to give him rights.  He tried to explain that they needed backups, etc but they wouldn’t hear of any DBAs pissing all over their dev box. 

And now when there’s massive corruption and they need to get their dev code back they call the DBA to ask for help.  Y, fat chance guys. 

I’m here to tell you that the DBA has full snotting rights here.  And it only goes to teach them a lesson I hope.  DBAs aren’t here to piss on your parade.  We’re here to make sure your parade lasts as long as you want and you can even start your parade over and over again if you need to.  Seriously guys all metaphors aside, we’re here to help.  So stop acting like we’re on different sides.

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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.