RE: Oracle and Sun fingered for Sidekick fiasco

    I would second your comments as they did post a job for a Unix admin who's duties included  

"A key priority is automating reliable reporting log file transfer and
database load functionality - existing environment has fragile software and is unreliable, requiring manual DB cleanup and re-run of data loads, retrieving missing files, etc."  

    Now a good part of that is a DBA's job and advertising that you have fragile software and an unreliable platform is even more indication that they were not built for the long term. It is a fact of life that Murphy's Law will sooner or later come to fruition. Not IF, but WHEN and when that day comes you had better be ready.  

    Good thing to do, talk the boss into extra hardware so you can periodically try recovering your mission critical databases from tape. That way you know the tapes are good and the procedures work. We do twice a year.  

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Lead
PAREXEL International  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 12:30 PM
To: George.Johnson_at_gam.com; Oracle Discussion List Subject: Re: Oracle and Sun fingered for Sidekick fiasco

My guess... Sounds like a startup that didn't consider backup and recovery, if they did they didn't test their strategy and they paid the price. Probably didn't bother to hire people who knew what they were doing and/OR they didn't want to fund an appropriate backup infrastructure. This has happened before, one recent case is a blog site that went down and lost all their data because they felt that RAID-5 (or was it 0+1 I forget at the moment) was sufficient to protect them from data loss. Of course, the entire disk array went south and they were dead in the water.

I say it in almost every presentation I do, backup and recovery *IS* the DBA's #1 job. Nothing else is as important becuase nothing else matters if there is no data and no database. If you work for a company that does not respect that truth, it's time to update the resume and move on because it's only a matter of time before things go *poof*.

RF  

Robert G. Freeman
Oracle ACE
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From: "Johnson, George" <George.Johnson_at_gam.com> To: Oracle Discussion List <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Mon, October 19, 2009 10:17:03 AM
Subject: Oracle and Sun fingered for Sidekick fiasco

Would anyone care to hazard a guess as to what happened? Purely as an academic exercise, you understand.  

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/sidekick_rac/  

I am actually genuinely curious as to what people might think happened. We are about to head into ASM/RAC territory and it would good to hear some worse case theories, based on the flimsy outline given in the story.     

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