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| | A Bad First Day I've started quite a few jobs throughout my career. In college, I worked in a variety of restaurants, changing employers at the start of every summer and again at the start of the school year. At some of those positions, I had a hectic beginning, with the staff shorthanded days and no one to train me, but they needed me to jump in. More than a few bartender jobs started like that, with me jumping in, making drinks, and teaching myself where things were stored. Luckily there weren't a lot of mistakes I could make that might severely damage the business. Fortunately the frequency of new jobs has declined over time, though if I changed positions at this point, I'd go through much of the confusion that many new starters have. Where are things, how do I get work done, what credentials and procedures do I use, and more would be the questions on my mind for a few days. Perhaps a DevOps shop might smooth the process out and prevent issues, but I could see how this type of mistake could be made: a new intern used a document to setup a database, and ended up crashing the production database. There are lots of comments on that post, but essentially a setup document contained production values (url, user, pwd) and a junior developer used those values instead of the output from their local laptop. I common mistake. A document should have no ambiguity, and certainly should never have production passwords inside of it. Individual credentials should always be used to connect to sensitive systems, with some auditing of who connected (and hopefully what they did). I've had developers crash databases before and delete data. If they're databases I manage, there's a backup. I've never been in the situation where a database I was managing didn't have some backup. However, I've had clients and coworkers managing databases with no backups. Perhaps the situation I felt lots of empathy for was a client that had developers making backups before they deployed updates to a client database. One day an update didn't work correctly, and it asn't until a day later they realized. At that point, they couldn't restore the backup. They called me, only to have me inform them that they were actually making striped backups. Unfortunately, they had deleted one of the stripes, and we couldn't find it. Data loss, that fortunately didn't kill the company, but it did cost quite a bit. There are any number of ways that a person can make a mistake on their first day. To prevent this, a good process should limit the damage that an individual can cause because of ignorance. This might be especially important for anyone that might have access to production data. Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.comJoin the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
| The Voice of the DBA Podcast Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn. The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. | |
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| | | Press Release from Redgate Resilient T-SQL code is code that is designed to last, and to be safely reused by others. The goal of defensive database programming, the goal of this book, is to help you to produce resilient T-SQL code that robustly and gracefully handles cases of unintended use, and is resilient to common changes to the database environment. More » |
| Additional Articles from Database Journal In this tip, Greg Larsen shows you how to set variables in your calling T-SQL code when using sp_execute sql. More » |
| Dharmendra Keshari from SQLServerCentral Blogs As a continuation of “Database Monitoring using DMV” series, this blog will cover how quickly you can address the log... More » |
| matthew.mcgiffen 73574 from SQLServerCentral Blogs In the last post we looked at using the STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME commands to measure query performance. If you’ve... More » |
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| | Today's Question (by Steve Jones): If I run this: seq(10, 20) I get this: 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 What if I want 10 12 14 16 18 20 How do I code this? |
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right. We keep track of your score to give you bragging rights against your peers. This question is worth 1 point in this category: R langauge. We'd love to give you credit for your own question and answer. To submit a QOTD, simply log in to the Contribution Center. |
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| Yesterday's Question of the Day |
| Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones): What does AUTO mean when this is the value set for PROCESS AFFINITY? Answer: A thread can randomly pick a CPU based on server workload Explanation: Auto is the default process affinity, which means that any thread can freely be assigned to any CPU at any time. This is recommended unless you have a reason to change this. Ref: ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION - click here » Discuss this question and answer on the forums |
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| Database Pros Who Need Your Help |
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