RE: Flippin Consultants!
- From: "Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>, <howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 10:06:20 -0400
This is one time I'm going to agree with the "flipping consultant"
and Niall in general.
Engaging a consultant is all about the Statement of Work. If it's
not in there then there is no need to find what you don't know. Would I
get cross with the consultant, possibly if it was impacting a production
critical system, otherwise I'd wander over to where he/she is working
and politely ask. Remember you both have a job to do and your
representing your respective companies in the process, so leaving a good
impression is in both of your interests. Now getting cross with your
manager for not filling you in and/or asking for your input before the
SOW was written is the much more productive direction to pursue.
I've been on both sides of this fence and both of them can smell
nasty or pleasant. All depends on the SOW, the information flow, and
the people involved.
Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
PAREXEL International
________________________________
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 9:03 AM
To: howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: Flippin Consultants!
Probably, but be sure who you are cross with.
If someone has just kicked off a 25gb export *and* a 25gb network file
transfer into the bargain without the courtesy to let anyone know what
he was doing, or to ask if it was an appropriate time, then I'd say yes,
and be cross with them.
If on the other hand they've been brought into do a task, have defined
that task in their engagement letter/statement of works or whatever
describes their deliverable work and it's your organisation that hasn't
bothered to tell you or ask you what was going on, well I'm not sure the
consultant deserves to get it in the neck. Remember they likely won't
know who does what job, the history of the servers involved and so on.
by the way, I'd also probably react badly to an unexpected email that
proclaimed that "what you are doing is wrong, you should do it like this
and anyway I didn't have any right to go tramping on someone else's
territory". One that said, "I see you are doing x, I wonder if we could
work together on it, and perhaps use method-r instead of method-g,
because of reason y" would probably get me to stop and think, certainly
make me think 'here is someone I should work with', and avoid mutterings
in the corner.
but then I am a consultant now :)
cheers
Niall
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Howard Latham <howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Just sent this to a consultant working here - Am I right to be
cross?
Exporting 25 gig of data and copying it and importing has many
risks.
The amount of archivelogs produced will slow you down hugely as
will index creation.
You will probably have to have several goes. And disk space is
getting tight on box2
I would suggest you use transportable table spaces. I don't
think they are currently transportable currently otherwise you could
have used the backup I am doing now.
I have freed some space on box2 but please don't start copying
until my test is done. Its pretty hard to get a test slot and copying
large files would slow things down.
You could also use the rman backups.
Also please do me the courtesy of letting me know when you are
embarking on exercises that will have a major impact on our servers. I
am after all supposed to be looking after all the Linux Boxes and all
the databases.
--
Howard A. Latham
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info
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