Oracle FAQ Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid
HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US
 

Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Re[4]: Big Whoops

RE: Re[4]: Big Whoops

From: Norwood Bradly A <Bradley.A.Norwood_at_M1.IRSCOUNSEL.TREAS.GOV>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 12:53:47 -0400
Message-Id: <10508.106724@fatcity.com>


In 13 years of DBA work, the event has never ruined my day and I think it is due to paranoia...I am always concerned about the current sid to the point of checking it too frequently during crucial activities.

I also look both ways on a one-way street.

Perhaps, there is a third type of DBA: the Paranoiac!

-----Original Message-----

From: Robert Eskridge [mailto:bryny_at_dfweahs.net] Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 12:20 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Re[4]: Big Whoops

Steve,

Thursday, May 25, 2000, 10:38:38 AM, you wrote:

S> I'd like to post a question for everyone on the list.

S> How many of you have ever dropped a table, or done something like that in

S> the wrong database(thinking you were connected to say the test DB), and S> hosed production?

I'm guessing there are two types of DBA's, those who have done something like this and those who don't administer production databases.

I'd had a pretty good streak going, about 9 years since my last production trash when I slipped in late December.

We had about a dozen databases both production and test that we were re-arranging on various machines and storage devices in order to move equipment to a co-location. I was supposed to be copying the datafiles for a test instance but was in a sub-directory shallower than where the script I intended to run was, I'd forgotten that I'd modified my path in that session and wound up running the script set up for a production one. I didn't realize it for about 5 minutes by which time my system tablespace had been trashed. Unfortunately our standby database had been taken down to free equipment for the move. <sigh>

Of course the moral was, "Explicitly include the SID in the name of dangerous scripts and never put them on your path."

It didn't take too long to restore from snapshot and apply the archive logs, but it sure was embarrassing. It did give me an opportunity to turn to one of the junior DBA's that had trashed production on 9/1/97 and say, "See, I wasn't lying when I said it happens to everyone."

-rje

--

Author: Robert Eskridge
  INET: bryny_at_dfweahs.net

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists

--------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 11:53:47 CDT

Original text of this message

HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US