Why Every DBA is a Clown

It’s late, really late and you’ve got a mountain of work to get through to meet the deadline. To add to it, you also have numerous other urgent items and they’re all high priority of course. You feel panicked because you cannot possibly get it all done, you know that you are going to fail.

For those new to the event, #mememonday is the community creation of Thomas LaRock (Blog|Twitter), the driving force of which is to encourage the SQL community to put virtual pen to paper. This months theme “Working with deadlines”.

We’ve all been in a horrible situation like this at one time or another. Wondering how we got ourselves into such a mess. The truth is that such inevitable failure was preordained way before any deadlines came into view. Indeed, these panicked pressure scenarios often come about not as the result of any single significant event but instead as the result of a cumulative effect. It’s the repeated and compounded result of neglecting to plan.

What starts out as seemingly quite trivial, can quickly escalate and run away from you. The more items you juggle at any given time, the more susceptible you are to things wandering out from your reach of control.

When you’re a DBA and things get out of hand the consequences can potentially be astronomical. We’re talking business closure, Game Over. This is why a really good Production DBA is quite literally worth their weight in Gold. Almost everything they do on the job has the potential to impact the bottom line of a business in either a positive or negative way. That’s some serious responsibility right there!

As outstanding Data Professionals then it’s clear that we have a responsibility to ensure that we meet our deadlines on time every time. We can only hope to achieve this with robust planning, context awareness, effective communication and a lot of luck