The acronym RTFM stands for Read The Fucking Manual. It’s quite obvious that reading the manual is the perfect approach for finding the correct information or at least a hint for finding the solution.
The false confidence or a lack of humbleness make people to forget how important is to read the documents. Understanding the documents is the next step, and is not simple indeed. In particular if the background is poor or the reader have preconceptions which alter the word meanings.
The failure is not an option. Despite this statement is quite pretentious is also the rule number zero of any decent DBA. The task failure, should this be a simple alter table or an emergency restore, is not acceptable. The database is the core of any application and therefore is the most important element of the infrastructure.
In order to achieve this impossible level, any task should be considered single shot. Everything must run perfectly at the first run like if without rollback plan. However the rollback procedure must be prepared and tested alongside with the main task on the test environment in order to get a smooth transition if the rollback should happen. It’s also very important to remember the checklist. This allow the DBA to catch the exact point of any possible failure ensuring a rapid fix when this happens.
I’ve already started writing the second volume of the database
administration series.
The first volume was quite basic with enough information to be useful
but not too much to scare people.
The second volume is strongly focused on the database administration and I decided to start it with a chapter explaining what it means to be a DBA.
Probably this will dissuade many people to start this exciting career.
So, here we go again.
