Must Resist Urge to Beat Sys. Admin.'s and DBA's

I was happily working on my project when one of the System Administrators poked his head into my office notifying me that the development DB server had to be rebooted.

"Why are you rebooting it?" I ask.

"We need to add more disk space."

"You need to reboot a Sun Fire Server to add disk space? Doesn't it have hot swappable drives?"

"Yes, but we need to reboot it."

"Okay."

They shut it down cold. No 'shutdown -h now'; just a hard power down. They bring it back up, my DB is corrupted. Ergh!

Walk over to the DBA. "Can you restore my DB from backup for me?"

"I was not backing up the development DB's," sayeth the DBA.

Burning... fire... anger... hatred... murderous intent...

Apparently, we will not be hitting the June 2nd release date, now. I have all of the SQL scripts that handle table creation, foreign key definitions, procedures, functions, etc. in CVS. But, all the data in the look-up tables is gone. And, that, actually, constituted quite a bit of data. Think of all the lookup tables you need for a University -- normalized department listing, majors, schools, classrooms, buildings, classes, etc.

So, sure I have code like this stored in CVS:

create table LUCOLLEGE
(
  IDCOLLEGE           NUMBER not null,
  COLLEGEABBREVIATION VARCHAR2(4) not null,
  COLLEGENAME         VARCHAR2(255)
)
tablespace LDAPTEST_DATA
  pctfree 10
  pctused 40
  initrans 1
  maxtrans 255
  storage
  (
    initial 16K
    next 8K
    minextents 1
    maxextents 500
    pctincrease 0
  );
-- Create/Recreate primary, unique and foreign key constraints 
alter table LUCOLLEGE
  add constraint PK_LUCOLLEGE primary key (IDCOLLEGE)
  using index 
  tablespace LDAPTEST_DATA
  pctfree 10
  initrans 2
  maxtrans 255
  storage
  (
    initial 16K
    next 8K
    minextents 1
    maxextents 500
    pctincrease 0
  );
alter table LUCOLLEGE
  add constraint UQ_LUCOLLEGE unique (COLLEGEABBREVIATION)
  using index 
  tablespace LDAPTEST_DATA
  pctfree 10
  initrans 2
  maxtrans 255
  storage
  (
    initial 16K
    next 8K
    minextents 1
    maxextents 500
    pctincrease 0
  );

So, it will be easy to recreate the structure. But, there is thousands of data rows that populated those tables. And, it was month's of detective work pouring over 97 hundred different main frames and department-run MS Access tables to track down the different data that was normalized. Bah!

Luckily, I do have 97% of the data written in flat-ASCII files because that is how the data was extracted for me during meetings that went something like:

"Yes, I have a partial listing of all of the different majors we offer here."

"Can I have access to it?"

"No, it's in a 7 year old Access file that is so horribly corrupted it cannot be copied from file system to file system."

"Uhhh... can you just dump me all the data in it to a flat file so I can Perl over it, fix it, and insert into the master Oracle tables."

"Maybe."

"Do it, or I publish the entirety of your email on the Internet including the one's from your 17-year-old mistress."

"Okay."

Let that be a lesson. Never trust a DBA to be doing back-ups. Never trust a Sys. Admin. from having a lose-power-button-hitting-finger. And, threats of public humiliation will get you everywhere.