Originally posted by jodie
Interesting comments. I agree with you all.

Ufortunately, not everyone is as accepting as you guys.

At my last company, as a Jr. DBA, I did some weekend maintenance. During the maintenance window, we had several problems with Production (running on the backup system). Due to craziness, I forgot to analyze one of the tables. It had some nasty performance affects come Monday. My fellow DBA and I found the problem, reported it to management (like you suggested, Hanky), and fixed the problem. My management was clueless and wouldn't have known any different if we didn't tell them what the problem was. I felt terrible, but knew that I did the right thing owning up to my mistake. My boss told me don't worry about it. 3 days later I was called into his office and written up for the "screw-up" - Step 1 of 3 to be fired. I was floored.

It was crazy, because I was the most Jr DBA, but had been doing 75% of the maintenance for the previous year - all without incident!

So, I do agree with you all about owning up to your mistakes. I always felt good that I didn't hide anything. But know that not all managers are as forgiving.

Jodie
Sorry to say - but you had some really dumb management that gave you warning for something like that! Your immediate DBA/systems manager should've known better. You made the right choice by giving them the boot.

I started this thread coz - I was recently called in to do root cause analysis on some issues on some critical machines. I noticed none of these machines/databases had been backed up in 6 months! The DBA's hadn't been monitoring it. No body was looking at the alertlogs..major batch processes were failing every night. No one bothered to check even, while the customer was in pain.

To top it all, a major incident happens. A tablespace had been in backup mode for several months. The machine crashes. The database startup obviously failed since one of the tablespaces was in a backup mode when it crashed. This group of DBA's decide that they need a full database recovery to fix it! (Talk of being incompetant). They wipe the existing database..then find that they didn't have a good backup either. They restore an age old database from 8/9 months ago and tell the customer/management that extensive corruption creeped in from several months ago. What a load of cr@p.