Foreword
Learn from the Experts and Be Humble
Why are DBAs so humble? The answer is that being a DBA is a humbling experience even for the most intelligent perfectionists in the crowd. There are several hundred books on Oracle, but there are few that are written for the beginner. Dan has given the beginner to intermediate Developer or DBA a priceless reference of examples in this new effort.
I remember being the beginner DBA back in 1987. Brad Brown and Joe Trezzo used to play a joke on me back in 1987; they would type the ior i (which was the command to wipe out the entire database) on my computer when I was at lunch. The next statement was “Are you sure Y/N?” to which they would type “Y” and wait for me to return. All I needed to do was press “Enter” and the entire database would be wiped out. Immediately upon getting back from lunch, they would ask me to press “Enter” to start something that they wanted to run on my computer. I would begin to press it, but stopped just in time. After scaring me half-to-death with the almost re-initialization of my database, they would chuckle, insisting that “a good DBA needs be able to assess a situation, act with discipline and react quickly and correctly, we were just testing you.” They were right—a good DBA must be able to adapt and overcome like few other professionals. It was my first lesson in becoming a good DBA. Something worth noting is that the ior i would not have actually re-initialized my database. It turned out that Brad and Joe were running a Basic program Brad wrote to replicate the look of Oracle's shutdown process.
My second lesson came from sleep deprivation. We used to have to stay up all night to run certain queries because the system we had could not process everything fast enough. We were running a souped-up 286 PC with the cover off and fans blowing on it to keep the extended memory cards and other boards from melting since we had stacked them on top of each other outside the physical dimensions of the box. It wasn't quite your “off the shelf PC,” but it was the closest thing to a mainframe replacement that we could get. We were running several departments that we were converting to Oracle.
Ron Janus, the department leader, was driven to get off the mainframe and into the client server world with Oracle. The only problem was that it didn't exist; not the hardware, not Oracle on client/server and certainly not the architecture that could be replicated from another client. The solution? Hire Brad, Joe, and Rich of Oracle Corporation (in our pre-TUSC days) to invent it—which was exactly what we did. I was the beginner, but I was blazing the trail. Staying up all night was common, and we started to get to a point where we had to find a way to make queries faster, which we finally did by accident one night. I forgot a table in a sub-query join and it turned a four-hour query into four minutes—the correlated sub-query was born! The point is that I would never have discovered this if I weren't a beginner. Being a beginner got me to think out of the box and make some great discoveries, since I had no idea where the box was. That was the good aspect of being the beginner.
The bad aspect of being a beginner was my next lesson. I was loading data one night and some of it got corrupted. I began to delete data and soon became tired of repetitively running similar deletes over and over again, so I decided to write a dynamic delete statement. A mistake in this wonderful statement would deliver more pain to my life than any other IT experience to that point. I could never express how much pain, stress, and disappointment I was feeling as I rebuilt the entire database. It was beyond belief. I wished that I had never started down the DBA track. Few things in all of life felt worse than that night. But once again, those who sow in tears reap in joy. I would end up discovering a new method for recovering corrupted data, one that had never been done before. The benefit of being a beginner once again led to a great discovery.
I eventually became the intermediate-to-advanced DBA, but I was still at the dangerous beginner-to-intermediate level (I knew just enough to be dangerous) on UNIX. I was installing Oracle7 on Data General UNIX. I had convinced a client that they should scrap their plan of a six-month development cycle to port to Oracle7 and instead save all that money by having their DBA and myself migrate to Oracle7 over the weekend. It would be the correct decision, but one that would once again test my tolerance, (and that of the client's excellent DBA, Julie O'Brien) for stress.
The version of Oracle for Data General turned out to be immature (the previous Oracle7's I installed all went well, but were on a different flavor of UNIX). I ended up rebuilding and re-linking the Oracle kernal several times with the help of a top 'C' guru named Jake Van der Vort (now a TUSC VP). I had to repeatedly remove the entire Oracle system every time I tried to re-install. I found a great new UNIX command called rm –r that removed the entire Oracle Home (Oracle's main directory) and all directories underneath. This made it very fast to delete everything and start over.
Somewhere around 3AM, I ended up in the root directory (“/”) and ran the rm –r thinking that I was in the Oracle directory. When I saw things being removed (like pieces of the operating system), I scrambled to break the command. I was too late. I had deleted the entire operating system. I had to call Data General and in one of the most humbling experiences I've encountered, I had to admit that I had deleted everything, and they would need to reinstall the operating system. After a major scolding, they rebuilt the O/S for me. (I did plead with them to keep this quiet. They later told just about everyone that I knew that I had done this.) I felt like a child approaching my parents just after breaking something they told my not to touch. The experience I gained from this was that I should never make anyone who was a beginner feel as bad as I felt during this experience. Being the beginner (this time on UNIX) was both painful and humbling.
Of course, you want to pretend to be the expert if you don't want people to know that you are a beginner (which is not a very good idea). You can sound like an expert, even if you're a beginner, by using a few of the phrases listed below.
“What's documentation?”
“Do a shutdown abort, restart it and call me if it doesn't work.”
“The password is manager for a reason.”
“I'm not calling support for help, I'm calling to listen to the music while I'm on hold.”
Instead of pretending to be the expert, learn to be the expert. Learn from Dan Hotka, so that you don't have to relive the experiences that all DBAs have learned the hard way. The reason that I've shared my experiences is so you'll see the benefits of being the beginner. The frustration and pain that I felt as a beginner were the seeds that helped me grow into an expert. You must grow in both knowledge and experience; one without the other can make you a dangerous DBA.
Read the entire book from expert Dan Hotka! You will increase your knowledge and learn from Dan's experience. This priceless combination is the way to take your knowledge to the next level quickly. Being the beginner DBA is one of the most humbling experiences you will ever have, which is exactly why DBAs are so humble. But, the increase in world productivity over the past decade is, in part, attributable to the tireless hours that these DBAs dedicate to their jobs.