DBA Ignorance , complacency and arrogance experiment

I’m reading “Savages” by Don Winslow – it’s a stripped down thriller about drug cartels. How does this relate to DBAs?

 There’s a passage where the main characters , Chon and Ben – apply some self criticism.

 There system is :

Complacency

Arrogance

Ignorance

 Two  will get you three.

 An interesting idea , applied in the right context , can yield some insight into the inner workings of the IT professionals mind.

 I applied this system to reviewing some High Priority problems as an experiment.

 Which of these (either one or combination) characteristics existed that may have contributed to either : a) create the situation or b) delay the resolution  . ?

In the last week , here are the top five reasons based  on this analysis. Of course , Database Server problems can be complex – sometimes out of the control of the DBA. Database Servers are part of a large IT ecosystem.

 1) Couldn’t restore the backup from last night , as the Operations team hadn’t rerun the a failed backup  

2) Disk drive filled – on the data drive

3) A developer logged on to a Production system and dropped a table.

4) The Backup &  Restore software couldn’t restore a database with multiple files , due to a bug . Operations were aware of the bug and had been very slow in applying the fix pack

5)REORG job still running at start of business time – killing performance