The Art of Resistance
Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy. Be resistant to change. Here’s a story about how stubbornness pays off. As we’ve written about before A 4 letter word divides Dev & Ops.
A True Story of Resistance
I had one experience working as the primary MySQL DBA for an internet startup. Turns out they had Oracle for some applications too. And another DBA just to handle the Oracle stuff.
So, it came time for the Oracle guy to go on vacation. Suddenly these Oracle systems landed on my shoulders. We reviewed everything in advance, then he bid his goodbyes.
Almost as soon as he was out the door, I started getting requests to change things.
“Oh we have to add this field”, or “Oh we’d like to make this table change”.
I resisted enough to hold off development for a week.
“We’re now getting more heat from the CTO. Apparently, certain pages on the site don’t save some very important content properly. It’s costing the business a lot of money. We need to make this change.”
My response –
“No, I can’t sanction this. If you want to do it, understand that it could well break Oracle’s replication.”
Oracle’s multi-master replication notoriously requires a lot of babysitting. We held off for a few more days, and the Oracle DBA returned from his much-needed vacation.
When discussing it afterward he said…
“Am very glad you didn’t change those fields in the database. It would indeed have broken replication and caused problems with the backups!”
Conclusion
The moral of the story is – Apply the brakes around tight turns. Don’t be afraid to say, we’re not going to do this before testing. You may have to say – we’re not going to do this at all…
