Main | Reduce ASM Configuration Complexity »
Find a Road and Stick With It
By Eric Gross | May 21, 2007
Everyone knows that the simplest route from point A to point B is a straight line. I assume that most people are interested in finding the best method to solve the issues at hand - that’s what DBA’s generally spend their time doing in one fashion or another. It doesn’t even matter what the current process is, and in all but the greenest of situations, there is already some way to get from A to B that is common procedure. Hopefully those steps are properly documented, but that’s another post.
So, let’s assume that you and your co-workers have a run book describing how to handle tasks. Anne is performing one of those tasks and she comes up with an improvement that saves a bunch of time. It makes sense that Anne would want to save time so the next time she needs to run the job again, she uses the shortcut she discovered. (Hopefully the steps are scripted) All is well, until Anne calls out sick and Bob needs to take over running her stuff. However, since Anne found a new route from A to B and didn’t tell everyone to change their route, it is quite possible that Bob will have trouble completing this task because some infrastructure required for the original procedure has been broken, since Anne found a shortcut, or perhaps because there actually are unnoticed (untested) implications that affect other things.
The moral of the story is that a single path must clearly be defined to solve each problem. This path should be as automated as possible to reduce differences between executions. The key consequence of maintaining multiple paths is that none of them get the deserved level of attention. Finding an improvement to an existing procedure is only a realized gain if the antiquated version of the procedure is put to pasture - any other solution can only increase complexity.
Topics: Consistency
December 4th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
[...] you are have successfully implemented a set of steps that accomplish a goal, Stick With It until there is a true reason to deviate from that [...]