Chapter 5: Run!!!
I decided to share the most interesting, tragic, nonsense and, funny stories of my 15 years as a DBA. Names, dates and locations will be omitted to avoid direct connections with the real facts.
The tale is really small today, just a remote and nonsense remember I have.
In the middle of the 90’s I was working for one of the biggest companies in the country. There were CPDs all around the city, in the multiple buildings of the business units. And the second larger one was placed in the headquarter, where I was located.
Many critical systems were running in the servers hosted 4 floors above mine. All of the development and test environments were there too, increasing their importance for the software engineers, hundreds of them.
But the electrical infrastructure was not well sized for the demand and outlets were frequent, once a week at least. And the no-breaks were not enough either, giving us some minutes to act when electricity was down. So we, the DBAs, had to run in the dark, 3 floors up trough the stairs, once a week. What for? To properly shutdown the servers, al least the production environments. To protect the data physical integrity, what was always a risk when an unexpected shutdown happened. It was something like 10 minutes to shut 30 servers down, what gives you the idea on how fast we went trough the stairs and start the process. In a meeting? No problem, it is ok to leave it running as fast as possible, the all company was aware of the problem.
In most of the time, we didn’t have time to stop all server, what was constantly creating more trouble for the DBAs: to fix the databases.
This problem was not common in the weekends, since the building was mostly empty. That’s all. At the same time it was bad for the company, at least it kept us physically active.
Don't miss the other chapters of this series of articles on the "Adventures " of a DBA:
SR Program Manager - Azure Cosmos DB at Microsoft
5yAlexandre Maurício Duarte