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." Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 11:09:15 CDT