Worst Day as a DBA

What was your worst day as a DBA?

We all have ups and downs in our life, perhaps some of those bad days are the days that make us realize how good we have it on a good day. There are things with family and friends that can make things better or worse, but what I am interested in today is what was your worst day as a DBA?

For me I can think back to a datacenter move for a company that my employer at the time had just acquired. We were moving 3 racks of servers from one colo facility to another colo facility. There people had helped pull everything out of one datacenter and we had to reassemble it at another data center. The server in question was a SUN Solaris Unix system running Oracle, and it had an EMC fiberchannel attached storage unit with 3 racks of drives and some battery backups for the storage, along with 2 controllers. Well when it was taken apart there were not enough labels or directions on what plugs in where to get the server properly reconnected. Of course this was a storage system and hardware environment that I had never worked on before, and the company had no support for the hardware, either the storage or the server hardware. About 20 hours later we finally were able to get the server up and running correctly. My lesson learned was never move hardware especially storage with specific details on how the server is going back together and who you would call for support if something didn’t work correctly.

So, please post and tell us what your worst day as a DBA was and why it was so bad? What happened, and how did you survive?

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