Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 15 THE BIG PICTURE AND THE TEN DELIVERABLES
Signoff
This section describes who decides that the performer has executed the work correctly.
Record-Keeping
This section makes the record- keeping requirements explicit.
Quality Assurance
This section describes any quality assurance procedures that should be used to assess the
quality and accuracy of the work.
KILL FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER?
An article titled A Day in the Life of an Enterprise DBA was published in the March 1998 issue of Oracle
magazine, published by Oracle. The protagonist used the Enterprise Manager tool to perform a variety of
tasks. Here is how he diagnosed and fixed a slow system.
“To find out who is hitting the system so hard, I start up TopSessions and look at the
user- resource usage on the system. I sort based on redo activity to find the culprit.
A developer is inserting data into the database and causing significant redo- log
activity. A double- click on the user shows me the actual SQL that has been executed.
Apparently, the developer is loading data onto the production system during production
time. Should I call him before I kill his session? No—kill first, call later.
He should know better. Soon after, the supervisors report that the system is running
well again.”
This brings to mind the 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day, starring Pierce Brosnan as
James Bond and Rosamund Pike as the double agent Miranda Frost. In the movie, Frost describes Bond
as follows:
“He's a double O, and a wild one as I discovered today. He’ll light the fuse on any
explosive situation, and be a danger to himself and others. Kill first, ask questions
later. I think he’s a blunt instrument whose primary method is to provoke and confront
…”
Your motto should not be “Kill first, ask questions later” but “Follow the SOP.” That way, you won’t
light the fuse on explosive situations and be a danger to yourself and to others!