I recently asked about the worst days in your career, so today let's turn it around. What are the best days of your career? If you can give us a list of 2 or 3 days, projects, accomplishments, etc., it might be fun to read.

Throughout my career, I have lots of little successes where I accomplish something that a client needs. Those add up, and they're good, but by nature there are so many and the numbers tend to blur the lines in my mind. Unfortunately, the mistakes I've made tend to be more memorable and stick in my mind. I really have to think about what I would consider the best days.

There are a couple software deployments that I consider to be successes, though none overly memorable. Getting my code into production is great, but rarely is a change a huge win. Instead, it takes time for clients to use the code, to understand the impact, and for me to be sure that the code works as expected.

I remember getting our first automated deployment done, almost twenty years ago, when we had moved from a manual process of collecting scripts and trying to ensure they were correctly ordered and contained all the changes we needed. After weeks of working on an automated process to collect, order, and execute scripts, we tested things in QA. Then a day later in production. Overall this was a non-event, with the deployment taking minutes. The change from constantly checking scripts, results, and manually executing code was amazing and the reduction of time spent getting ready was notable.

I also remember a great day as a DBA, when we experienced a server crash and had to rebuild new hardware. I was away with family, but I knew my backup and restore procedures were ready. I walked a manager through restoring a database, using a script to automatically build the log restore scripts, and then executing those scripts. While driving with my family, completely hands off, I helped recover a database.

I hope you have some good memories of your career, and can share one or two today.