Thursday, July 21, 2005
Settling down - A day in Real Life - give me anything but!
So, ADC is in NY to face whatever its fate will be. Tired. But have been catching up on my sleep. Today I started working on Shift again. Oh. Sentence fragments all over the place, so now I'm just cleaning that up. RWA Nationals are next week. It's been a flurry of setting up meetings and what not. I almost think I'd rather just go there and sleep a lot.
Anyway, what's new in my glamorous life? Well, today at work one of the SQL Servers rebooted itself in the wee hours and I was getting in the car at 5:30am when the GA office called me to report no one could get into the application that runs on that server. Get to work. Check things out. According to the nice replacement for the BSOD I'm told that the server has recovered from a serious error. After a reboot, and starting and stopping all services on the application server that talks to the SQL server the application works fine. Then I spend an hour reviewing the server, system and application logs to see what made it decide to reboot in the middle of all the backups. Clues, but no firm evidence although there's indications of some AD (active directory) and SNMP misconfigurations - that's the LAN admins, not the DBA so what do I know? But looks like a new process installed to compress the 50 GB data files may have hosed things up. I document. We have no good backups, however because the server rebooted in the middle of the SQL backups and right when the tape back up was kicking off. Erk. Then I have to finish trying to document the BCP (business continuity plan - that's consultant-ese for "What the eff are we going to do if the CA building blows up and the GA one doesn't?") for the application I'm in charge of documenting. I only have that one because it's really complicated - not complex, that might actually be interesting. No, this proprietary app is just complicated. Straight port from an AS400 into SQL Server, so naturally, the tables are denormalized and all the datatypes are CHAR instead of varChar. For crying out loud no wonder the freaking database is 50GB, and the client interface - think way back to Windows 3.1, that's how elegant the interface is. So, trying to document a BCP test plan is really a joy. Attend meetings. That's my day job day. See, there's a reason I don't talk about it in my writing blog. Never again.
