We all know was happens when you assume something. If you aren't sure, separate the first three letters from the word to see what you and I become. It's an old joke, but it has a lot of truth as its basis.
I was reading a thread on StackOverflow that talked about long held programming assumptions. It's a great thread to read, and there are some very interesting notes in there. I'd encourage you to read it, and I decided to borrow the idea here for DBAs as a Friday poll. So for this week:
What assumptions in your job do you had to overcome?
These could be long held ones, or constantly recurring issues that you work around. Are there assumptions that you would tell someone new to this profession that they ought to let go of immediately?
For me, I think that too often we look at disaster recovery in terms of video games. A hurricane or earthquake or even a large plasma grenade from HALO will wipe out our entire data center and we need to build a new one somewhere else with just the SQL Server media DVDs and our backup tapes. There are lots of smaller scale disasters, like the very common DELETE-without-a-WHERE-clause ones that we should also plan for.
I know there are lots of other assumptions that bite us on a daily basis, so give us the ones that you find most often and have to fight against.
Steve Jones
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