Archive for August, 2010
Backup Sanity Check
One of my pet peeves is when an application thinks its smarter than its DBA. Our helpdesk system was occasionally complaining that the database hadn’t been backed up in the past 24 hours. And our helpdesk manager was understandably concerned. That’s when I started doing some digging. My backup script was occasionally skipping databases that [...]
Failing the Smell Test
In addition to being a DBA, I’m a bit of a travel geek. I have a great love of airplanes, aviation, and travel. Today, I was looking at flights and saw something that made me think that it was a total violation of constraints. Just looking at this made me cringe. US Airways flight 0729 [...]
When things work
I’ve mentioned in the past that our facility had some serious drawbacks during power outages. During our migration to our new facility and data center a few weeks ago, we lost power to the building. Again this morning, we lost building power. Let me tell you what happened. Our servers didn’t even blink. The UPS [...]