Weekend? What weekend?
(Plz forgive the typos. I’m too fucking tired to fix’em.)
| 08:10 | I drag in a few minutes late. Fuck it. It’s Friday and I’m still tired from going in at 05:30. |
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| 09:15 | Discuss backup solution plan w/ Network manager. We have no standard, much less any real plan for backing up all of the database in our environment. Yesterday, I tracked down over 330 Gb of data and I KNOW I’m missing some systems… |
| 09:55 | Walking back to my desk, I overhear… “When did the system get corrupted? … I don’t know if we have any current backups … Two days ago according to the network guys, but the DBA said they wouldn’t work just yesterday … something about file locks and restore points.” Fuck. I’m the DBA and if this conversation is taking place something bad just happened… “Umm… What’s the status on database backups? I know we haven’t had anything previously, but is there any chance…” |
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| 10:10 | I call the woman in HR.
“Yes, it looks like I do have backups for your system.” “No, we will not be using the network backups unless I cant restore using the backups I created. No, this a process new I setup just last week.” … “7:53 is when you deleted a user’s account? I’ll try to restrore the database to 07:50. I’ll call you once I know more.” |
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| 10:50 | “You’ve been restored to 07:50. Check the data and let me know so I can restart the front end to the time clock system.” | |
| 11:00 | “I was wrong I need to rollback before 07:43.” | |
| 11:20 | “Done.” | |
| 11:25 | “You’re gonna kill me… I need to rollback to 16:30 yesterday.” | |
| 11:45 | “Done. It will take about 10 minutes for the web server to come online. Call me when you have checked the data.” | |
| 12:15 | “It worked. Please restart the DCM so we can start receiving time clock punches.” | |
| 12:30 | I’m walking out to my truck to get lunch… | |
| 14:10 | “The cluster has a problem.”
“What?” “The second node is having memory problems.” “When will it be fixed?” “Dell will be here this afternoon.” “I need to know if that machine is stable because I need to install SP2 for SQL 2005. I can’t automate backups because of a flaw in Microsoft’s implementation of maintenance plans. That flaw is fixed in SP2.” |
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| 15:45 | “I know you are not responsible for this Win2k system or the 2k database on it, but can you figure out why the transaction log backups are failing. They have been failing for weeks…” (It’s only our internal employee management system.) | |
| 16:20 | “You’re recovery model was wrong. Simple mode will not support transaction log backups. I rebuilt all of the maintenance plans to seperate the user and system databases. Everything is running correctly now.” | |
| 16:35 | “I did some research and the vendor doesn’t support the full recovery model.”
“Fine. I’ll roll everything back to simple and shut off the transaction log backups that you had requested. You do understand that I can’t do anything like the restore I did for … this morning without those transaction logs. Right?” “Why not?” … (Because it doesn’t fucking work that way. If you would RTFM, you would know these things AND you wouldn’t have to ask me to help you support YOUR system. Then again, I AM an arrogant fuck. So saith the Christine…) … “Hmm… Well, I’ll have to talk to … and … They have to decide how to proceed.” “When you do, remind … that all of the work I did this morning for her is related to this topic. Here’s a few links to go read up on this stuff. I’m not great at it, but you really need to understand the most simple parts to the SQL backup process if you are ever going to have any hope of restoring that system if/when it crashes.” (I’ve done data mining on that system and the data is reallllly ugly. So ugly, only the vendor can actually install the system correctly. I don’t care because I have enough shit to deal with at the moment.) |
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| 16:45 | “The server isn’t throwing errors any more.”
“Does that mean it’s fixed?” “Maybe… We thought it was fixed last month when it did the same thing. They replace memory then and we were back at square one today, so I don’t honestly know.” “Alright. I’ve got to get that patch applied so I can get these backups up and running. Today was a perfect example of what could happen if we don’t all work together and get these databases backed up in such a way that I have my live copy to restore off of, while you back everything up to tape all while neither of us fills up the disks on the server.” |
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| 17:05 | Department Head’s office: “I’ll be coming in, in the morning to install that patch. I can’t wait for another failure to get this process up and running.” |
And that sums up my work day…
Tomorrow, I will check the weather and either ride or drive into the office. Hopefully, I will spend 2 hours in the server room with my headphones on, installing SP2. If everything goes to shit, I will have to remove and reinstall SQL Server x64 in a cluster configuration, then apply SP1 and restore the data I backed up right before I started doing all of this crap.
I need sleep.
I could use a blow job as well, but that ain’t gonna happen with days like today.
Give me fuel
Give me fire.
Give me that which I desire…
or
If you don’t like my additude, you’re free to leave at anytime sweetheart…
