RE: Shutdown Abort, a defense of some guessing

With regard to "guesses"....

Personally, I am a strong personal believer in educated guesses, hunches or even intuition, *especially* when time is of the essence and when there is some experience behind the hunch. The "I've seen this before but I can't remember where" or "I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is" hunches often work for me, particularly for major problems that require immediate correction. I can't explain why this is the case, it just is. I wonder if some of it is just from having done this so much that perhaps there are some neurological pathway connections/relationships that have been made sub-consciously that fire when a given set of conditions exist....

What is really funny is that this ability to successfully have educated hunches seems to work better during a crisis rather than during a problem that is less than critical. I've always suspected that my brain just does not gear up the same way for something that can be done "whenever" as opposed to when "the system is down, uh-hu uh-hu, the system is down".

I've noticed this ability in other folks who have worked with a given technology too. I also notice that I get really frustrated with folks during system down emergencies who do not seem to possess this ability. One time, a client had like 6 DBA's working on a problem for almost 7 hours before I got a call. I had the problem solved in 20 minutes. In 40 minutes we were up and running. The solution I came up with was all based on a hunch I got about 2 minutes into being there. That just seems to be the way things work for me. I just could not understand how 6 other DBA's could not see what I saw.

Oh well....

RF

Robert G. Freeman
Oracle Consultant/DBA/Author
Principal Engineer/Team Manager
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Father of Five, Husband of One,
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