Tania in China

Wed, Nov 22: Scary Work Day

Today all the regular folks are back at work, but all the managers are still at the resort for a objectives-setting retreat, so the office is feeling very relaxed. We being our upgrade, and everything is going fine until I have to run my very first command against the database. It fails. I talk to Australia and they don't know what is wrong, and locally our other set of systems ran the command just fine, so I am stymied. I spend the next 8 hours comparing my system to the working system, picking apart the scripts to find the individual commands, and even backing up (twice) and rerunning the upgrade, all with no effect. I spend my dinner in the lounge with my laptop researching the problem on my company's internal problem reporting system, and the results don't look good: all the reports with the same errors as me have something wrong with their databases. I don't understand how I could have something wrong with my database since everything was fine Friday morning, and the command that failed is the very first command that touches the database, but I fear this is the case.

I continue working on the problem until my 10pm phone meeting with the US, and prepare documents to send to the US to see if they can help with the problem. Luckily one of the few people to dial into my phone meeting is a guy who has installed and upgraded dozens of systems like mine, and just off the top of his head he gives me the single command that fixes the system. Phew! I am absolutely estatic that there is nothing wrong with my database. It takes me another half hour to finish writing to everybody to let them know our problem is fixed and how it was fixed, and to finish the blog entry I have been working on all day. It is past midnight when I finally get to bed, but I am much happier than I would have been if I hadn't had that phone meeting!

I feel like I had spent the whole day trying to knock down a tree with a sledge hammer - I kept pounding and pounding and nothing happened. They Dan comes along with a chain saw and in a moment the tree is on the ground. A tiny bit of knowledge can trump a whole bunch of effort!

posted by Tania @ 9:35 AM