Re: Fw: OT - Getting fired for database oops

My experience as a DBA in a company that had a habit of firing people for
making a single dumb mistake was that they would immediately try and hide
the mistake in order to keep their job, so that a little problem that I
could fix with 20 minutes work with logminer or something would blow up in a
week or so to a major problem and cause an outage that took hours to fix.
But, the culprit could keep himself hidden so he kept his job...

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Guang Mei <gmei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> With so many real stories told, I am thinking maybe there are some common
> things one could do to reduce the chance of making bad mistakes.
>
> 1. Try not to open too many telnet/ssh or sqlplus sessions at the same
> time. I usually keep one or two. If I need to log into another db, I get out
> the current session(s) and log into the new db. If one needs to have prod
> and dev sessions both open, then try to set different background colors so
> one won't be confused.
> 2. Have the sqlplus prompt containing the instance name and user name
> (glogin file), if possible. Also type "show user" just to make sure before
> you run some important commands
> 3. For important commands, I try not to run scripts from sqlplus session, I
> have all the sql statements ready on notepad, and then copy and paste them
> into sqlplus one by one. This way if something fails, I can decide what to
> do next (rollback, etc). Also try them on dev db first, not run them on prod
> and you "think" they will succeed there.
> 4.Regarding rm command, I always go to the the bottom subdirecty, do ls
> first, then "rm filename(s)", I try not to use "rm *". Maybe a bit slow, but
> much safer.
> 5. If I need to drop a table, I rename it first, and drop it after several
> days if nothing happens. If I want to make some changes to a table data (on
> prod), If possible, I make a copy of the table data (CTAS) first.
>
> People make mistakes when they are in hurry or they do not pay attention.
> Slowdown a bit and double check your command sometime will save your day and
> possibly your job.
>
> Guang
>
>
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>


-- 
Andrew W. Kerber

'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'

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