Re: OT - Getting fired for database oops

  • From: Stephen Booth <stephenbooth.uk@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:07:49 +0100

On 05/18/2009, John Hallas <John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>  I do know of a DBA who deleted the test database ready for a refresh from
> production. The 578 datafiles took a long time to delete but slightly longer
> (36 hours)  to recover once he realised that he was logged onto production.
>

Something very similar happened in one of my past jobs.  A consultant DBA at
a customer site (employed by the customer through an agency) trashed the
main production finance system at 17:00 one Friday, thinking he was dropping
the QA one ready for a restore from the production backup over the weekend.
I then had to spend the entire weekend restoring the production system and
rolling it forward (this was a 23:55 by 7 (i.e. 5 minutes permitted downtime
a day) system, fortunately weekends were slow and there was provision to
cache transactions locally then apply them as a batch, unfortunately the
total transaction for the weekend amounted to about the average for 10
minutes transactions on Monday morning so getting it fixed for Monday was
vital), plus restoring the QA system.



The company got a £1.8 million fine for the outage  - government supplier
> etc
>

Fortunately we were able to get the system back by the early hours of Monday
morning so losses were minimal (about £1million, pocket change for this
organisation).


He kept his job though
>
>
>
I suspect that the DBA who trashed the database would have been sacked but
from what we could tell from some forensic unpicking of events, phone logs,
statements from people on site at the time and CCTV footage he spent about
30 minutes trying to fix it, phoned his agency for 10 minutes, cleared his
desk and left for destination unknown.  When contacted his agency denied any
knowledge of him.

The key lessons we learned from this were:

* Don't use the same passwords on production and QA (OS and Oracle).
* For any regular destructive jobs (e.g. deleting datafiles to clear down QA
ready for restore from prod) have a pre-written script that is only on the
server it's needed on rather than using a manual script.
* When you've broken a mirror from a 3 way stack to back up from, consider
not resilvering until the last possible moment (had this been the case here
we could have restored by resilvering from the detached copy to the other
two 'disks' and rolling forward on the logfiles, total downtime less than 3
hours).

We did try to get the customer to agree to us doing the trashing of the
database as part of our restore process on the Saturday but they insisted on
keeping control of the process and that it be done by their own staff.

Stephen

-- 
It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption.

http://stephensorablog.blogspot.com/ |
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenboothuk | Skype: stephenbooth_uk

Apparently I'm a "Eierlegende Woll-Milch-Sau", I think it was meant as a
compliment.

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. oracle-l
  3. Archive
  4. 05-2009