I was watching Scrubs recently, for the fourth of fifth time, as a way to pass some time during quarantine. I love that show, and it's been nice company for me many nights while I'm cooking dinner for the family as they finish up ranch chores outside. One of the episodes from season 4 is called "My Best Moment", where each of the main characters thinks about their best day in medicine. As a comedy, you can imagine that some of these aren't what some of us would think of as a best day at work, but it's an entertaining episode.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a question about your worst mistake as a DBA. There are some interesting things people think about when they consider making a conscious decision they come to regret. Since this reminded me of that Scrubs episode, I wanted to turn this around.

Today I'm wondering what was your best day as a DBA or software developer might have been.

It could be that solved a problem, or did something that impressed people. It could be that everything went your way. Maybe your best day was an unexpected time away from work where no one contacted you or nothing went wrong.

For me, I think my best days have been in crisis. One day that stands out was when I had a consulting client call me as I was on the way to New York. I was in the airport when they called about a problem performing what I would have thought was a simple restore. Developers had run a backup before performing a software upgrade, but when that failed, they couldn't get the database back to the previous state. They were an application service provider for their clients and were panicking a bit.

I couldn't connect and had to query them for information over the phone, picturing the situation in my mind. I managed to help them realize that there were multiple backup files needed, track them down, and then structure the restore statement. I managed to help them, finishing up the call as I was boarding. It was a busy day, where I needed to focus on other things for my day job, but landing in NY and hearing they had successfully restored their system for a client, made that a great day.

I'd like to think I have more good days than bad ones in this business, and it's one reason I've enjoyed working with data for so long. I hope you have some good stories to pick from when you've had a good day in this field.