Asking stupid questions

Oh boy have I asked some stupid questions in my time. Most recent was this question that I asked on #sqlhelp last week: –

I was struggling with installing SQL in a container via a dockerfile and couldn’t work out what was going wrong, so I asked this question on twitter.

The #sqlhelp tag on twitter is great and I got a couple of responses immediately telling me that I should check the install log files.

D’oh, I’d completely forgotten about those (it really is DBA 101 stuff). I’d gotten so wrapped up in working with that dockerfile that I’d forgotten the basic ways of troubleshooting a failed SQL install.

As it was, there wasn’t anything in the log file that pointed towards the issue but it made me go back and re-evaluate how I was performing the install. Instead of specifying the install switches in the command line I pointed the install to a config file and boom! The install worked (blog post pending).

I was actually pretty embarrassed about asking that question on twitter but thinking about it, the answers I got lead me to a solution and that was the whole point in asking in the first place!

So to anyone else out there struggling with an issue. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, there really is no such thing as a stupid one.

Have a good week!