I was talking with someone the other day about their environment and they were getting ready to test their database mirroring. They were on the East Coast of the US and the vast majority of their clients were on the West Coast, so they had planned on doing the test early one Wednesday morning. Their thinking was that plenty of people would be around (development and operations) to fix anything, and they would be back up before any of their clients noticed this.
Needless to say I was surprised. Even though the failover from database mirroring should work, and it should be quick to fix anything that didn't work and failback, I was still surprised. My career has included all types of deployments and maintenance windows, but the majority have always been on the weekend for me.
However things have changed, and there are so many different people out there running all types of applications for all types of clients. The software has gotten better, so I thought this might be an interesting Friday poll.
When can you schedule deployments or maintenance?
I don't know that you need to be as strict as the windows I had at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant. Our IT staff got one window a quarter, from midnight to 6am on a Sunday. However I also don't think most of you are allowed to deploy or do maintenance in the middle of your workday.
So when do you schedule most of your downtime? What makes sense and why, and is there a way you'd like to schedule your maintenance? Let us know this Friday.
Steve Jones
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