Execution Plan Tuning - A cautionary tale

Ok, here's my assumption that went oh so horribly wrong !

First Monday as junior dba (no training, no OCP, no idea, no brain !) but the guy who was the dba before me had given me instructions to
'remove a datafile' because the tablespace it was attached to was no
longer in use, had been deleted and so I could reclaim the disc space. (Hands up all those who know the punchline already ?)

So, I logon the the server, check the free disc space, rm the file, and check disc space again - no change !
Hmm. We need the disc space to extend another tablespace, but it won't give it back.
Someone with a bit of Oracle know how mentions that you may have to shutdown and restart the database to get the space freed up. So I do this at 14:00 (ish) and lo, the database will not start because there is a missing file - Aaargh !

Bloody dba before me, who left the company last Friday hadn't dropped the tablespace at all.

Took me until 02:00 the following morning to get the system back up and running - it wasn't in archivelog mode - and it was our company's only
'production' database. In fact, it was the one which has all of our
source code on. Boy was I popular ! In the end it was ok because the tablespace was due to be dropped and had been emptied by dropping the user, however, it did cause me a couple of nightmares. Nice first day in the new job though !

Cheers,
Norman.

PS. Now I'm paranoid instead !

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Foote [mailto:richard.foote_at_bigpond.com] Posted At: Friday, July 19, 2002 5:05 AM Posted To: server
Conversation: Execution Plan Tuning - A cautionary tale Subject: Re: Execution Plan Tuning - A cautionary tale

Hi Niall,

The first assumption should be to never assume (particularly in Oracle).

However, who can't honestly say been there, done that !!

Not me

Richard Received on Fri Jul 19 2002 - 07:04:55 CDT