July 9, 2010 at 8:34 am
jay holovacs (7/9/2010)
Assumptions get a bad rap, even though though they must regularly be re-evaluated.
They get a bad rap for good reason because there is usually an expensive cost associated with them consisting of wasted time and useless wild goose changes. Next time you get woke up at 3 in the morning chasing down someone else's hasty assumption you will begin to understand why they get this bad rap. 🙂
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
July 9, 2010 at 9:03 am
MeltonDBA (7/9/2010)
Premo number 1-O:It must be the database!
Shawn,
You beat me to my favorite - followed by - "Let's reboot the database server to see if it fixes it" ( where "it" = "practically any problem")
Cindy
July 9, 2010 at 9:08 am
Don't assume when someone calls that they want to talk to you!
We have a small department, so we all rotate on answering the support line. I have to remember that they are actually calling our department, not the systems analyst/DBA, and that I may be redirecting the call, or answering a question about 'My Favorites'...
July 9, 2010 at 9:35 am
I've read alot of these posts and they seem to be directed at the user always making assumptions. So here is a great assumption twist for you; Assume the user is right! "It the computer's fault.", "Something is wrong with the database." Take them down that path, holding their hand with a smile, because 95% of the time, you know who the assumer is going to be...:-P
July 9, 2010 at 9:53 am
Here's some assumptions I've made mostly back around 1999 when I was learning to be a DBA that bit me hard. At the time the DBA hat was a small hat compared to my other duties:
1) All Microsoft patches/updates/service packs are flawless. (SP 3 on Win nt4 didn't have my raid card drivers and we had to rebuild the OS and were down a full day)
2) Last nights backup ran. (Just before a large update with wrong data)
3) Data given to me by users to update is always accurate. (See #2)
4) Backup files are always good and don't need to be tested. (Luckily I learned this one by
testing backups and restoring them to sandbox systems.)
5) All developers undertand databases.
6) Contractors always have your companies interest at heart
The list can go on and on. Having failed making these assumptions I became a bit wiser. I learned to test everything, trust but verify and developed an interest in becomming a full time DBA.
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July 9, 2010 at 9:56 am
Alan Vogan (7/9/2010)
I've read alot of these posts and they seem to be directed at the user always making assumptions. So here is a great assumption twist for you; Assume the user is right! "It the computer's fault.", "Something is wrong with the database." Take them down that path, holding their hand with a smile, because 95% of the time, you know who the assumer is going to be...:-P
It's not always the end user making assumptions, as I stated before in my previous post, and anyway, holding their hand is not the DBA's job, particularly when we are awakened unecessarily at 3AM in the morning to solve an issue that may or may not even be database related simply because that was their first assumption. 🙂
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
July 9, 2010 at 10:45 am
One of the most common, and incorrect assumptions, I hear is that user is the enemy. Probably because so many users can be a pain in the backside.
Users are my customers, and it is in my best interest to keep them happy by doing my job well and continually educating them.
July 9, 2010 at 11:02 am
Years ago, the CIO mentioned in passing that he had ordered pagers for me and for the programmers who worked for me.
(Pagers were the high-tech equivalent of cell phones back in the olden days.)
I told him that when I and my programmers wrote such bad code that we needed to have pagers, I would find another line of work.
Never saw those pagers. 🙂
99.9% of the problems that came up were either network related or disk drive related, and the programming staff had no access to the tools or equipment to fix those issues. 99.9% of the rest could wait until 8am.
July 9, 2010 at 11:23 am
Backups always work if they complete successfully and have a valid header. Once upon a job the other DBA deleted 50,000 records by mistake. Many of them were records entered by the business that day. So we need to get them all back. Restore last night's backup on another server, start restoring transaction logs, WHAM! The 7:30 AM tran log restore failed. RESTORE HEADERONLY -- looks fine. No errors anywhere. It just flat out won't restore. We get Microsoft on the phone. They look at the file. They tell me that there's nothing that they can do -- the file just was backed up corruptly, and the data is unrecoverable. We were just out of luck and the data for that day that was deleted was gone forever (we didn't have a log reader then). I felt horrible but I had done due diligence. It just was a bad experience.
That was one reason we went to log shipping. Instant verification of all transaction log backups.
July 9, 2010 at 11:35 am
A bad assumption is to assume that the person with whom you are speaking understands what you are saying. Another bad assumption is that a SR. DBA is truly a SR. DBA and not just a title. We have to backup sometimes and remind ourselves that not everybody may know or understand what we are doing or saying even if they work in the same profession as us.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
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July 9, 2010 at 1:41 pm
dbowlin (7/9/2010)
One of the most common, and incorrect assumptions, I hear is that user is the enemy. Probably because so many users can be a pain in the backside.Users are my customers, and it is in my best interest to keep them happy by doing my job well and continually educating them.
Users aren't the enemy, developers are! 😀 Many think that because they once wrote a query or a stored procedure they now "understand" all there is to know about databases. Fortunately, it provides a living for us consultant types because we get to go in and fix those remarkably bad database designs and optimize those horribly written queries. I was asked once by a prospective employer why he should hire a database professional when he had a team full of developers who had been doing database "development" for years. I pointed out that database professionals are specialists and used a medical analogy that I think holds true. If you needed brain surgery, which individual would you want to do it, the general practitioner or the brain surgeon. (I didn't bother to point out that he wouldn't have an open requisition for a database professional if the whole developer thing had been working out.) I got an offer but I turned it down because it felt like it would be an uphill battle against people who already "knew it all".
"Beliefs" get in the way of learning.
July 9, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I think the assumption I run into the most is data model related. The idea that you have to de-normalize your (OLTP) data model for "performance". Once upon a time, in the 80's perhaps, when data engines were simple, memory was scarce, and caching either didn't exist or was very primitive that might have been true but it hasn't been true for many, many years.
"Beliefs" get in the way of learning.
July 9, 2010 at 1:53 pm
My number 1 incorrect assumption has been that I know enough about SQL Server.
WRONG!!!!!
There's something to learn or improve on every day without even including the new features added in 2005/2008.
In fact, I've taken to presenting SQL topics to our development group in part to keep my own learning going.
Phil Helmer
Database Engineer
July 9, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I think the Assumption that bothers me the most is...
The query, function, task worked fine for Jim at Company/Department A so I know it should work fine for me.
Difference in Network/Hardware/Versions etc... are never taken into consideration.
Joe
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