I hope that it never happens, but it's entirely possible, and maybe probably, that at some point, in some country, there will be an epidemic, or pandemic, that will devastate the populace. The US is preparing plans for such a pandemic and deciding how best to distribute the limited supplies of vaccines that may be available. The article is from last year, but I haven't seen more reporting on this and it's an interesting idea.
As you might expect, health case workers, military personnel, pregnant women and others are listed in the draft report, but some IT workers, especially in telephony and other types of communications. Now it's not a blanket priority given to all workers in those areas. Some people will get more priority than others and there may be plenty of people in those groups listed that would be lower in priority than others.
But it's a great recognition of just how important our IT infrastructures have become. We have become so dependent on IP based services in all aspects of society, but especially for our rescue and military groups and even healthcare is becoming more and more dependent in IT services. We've seen this with various disasters over the last few years have required rapid and extremely critical communication and IT services in order to meet the needs of those working in the area. At some point the IT people might be just as important as any other group in an organization.
I'm not sure about how database workers might fit into this area, but if your infrastructure must be recovered or rapidly moved, I can see production database administrators being critical to ensure that all of your information is not only available, but to ensure its integrity has not been compromised.
When dealing with healthcare, tough decisions will often need to be made, sometimes sacrificing a few for the good of the many. I'm glad that I'm not making those decisions, not knowing how you go about choosing who potentially lives and dies. There is one thing I'm sure of, however, and that's lowly writers such as me probably don’t rank any sort of priority on that list.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
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