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.
Finally I finished the first volume of the PostgreSQL book
administration.
The book is free to download on slideshare or, if you want the hard
copy there is the button to order on lulu.com.
I’ll build an ebook version in the next days and I’ll make it available on amazon’s kindle and the kobo.
I hope this book will spread the knowledge on PostgreSQL.
Anyway, I’ve not finished. I’ve already started a second volume and a manual for the developers willing to learn the noble art of the SQL writing.
So finally PostgreSQL 9.4 has been released. This version introduces a new schema less type, the jsonb which joins the other fantastic features abused and misused by the developers all around the globe.
The DBA improvements in this release is much more interesting and can push seriously the adoption in the enterprises of this DBMS.
Finally is possible to change the postgresql.conf settings using the ALTER SYSTEM SET command. The cool part is the values are validated when the command is issued. No more hosed clusters by typos. Kudos!
