How to put egg on your face

Here's a new recipe I discovered today for putting egg on my face:

1. Run low on disk on the server
2. Hurriedly delete "unused" database files in order to free up space because you are behind on a deadline.

(you can see where this is going, right<grin>).

3. Call up Oracle Support about a completely different problem.

4. While on the phone with the support analyst, "bounce" database instance to change a parameter setting.

5. Discover that instance won't start because files are missing.

6. Mutter various words that should be deprecated from the English language<grin>.

7. Defer discussion of original problem until you can rebuild the database.

8. Imagine support analyst laughing after she hangs up the phone.

It's very important to do steps 4-7 while on the phone with a knowledgeable Oracle professional, so that you can maximize the exposure of your utterly stupid act of deleting your database files while your database is running.

I should know better. It was a test database, and because of that I got a bit too cavalier with it. I paid by spending a couple of hours recreating the database from scratch. On the positive side, the support call involved some database links that I couldn't seem to drop. Trashing the entire database took care of that problem quite nicely<grin>.

Best regards,

Jonathan
mailto:jonathan_at_gennick.com Received on Tue Nov 14 2000 - 18:57:29 CST