Chapter 3 - Wait a minute!

I decided to share the most interesting, tragic, nonsense and, funny stories of my 15 years as a DBA. Names, dates and locations will be omitted to avoid direct connections with the real facts. 

Almost 2 decades ago I was a DBA doing as much consulting as possible, to make extra money. One good engagement drove me to the other and I ended up working for a month in one of the biggest companies in the country. The scope of my service went from performance optimization to database administration. 

The DBA team was ORACLE specialized, making lots of mistakes on the SQL Servers. After a difficult start, they ended up accepting me and mostly my work, my knowledge. The good work helped to open much more doors for my career and it was interesting how, years later and working for different big SW companies, I returned as a consultant to the same client 2 more times. 

Also interesting was the impact of that first project there. The manager of the most problematic system, who hired me, was promoted to IT Director because on her bet on my work for her downsizing initiative, whose performance went from terrible to very good. 

In one of those returns, again there were performance and administration problems in SQL Server. It was no longer the same DBA team, almost a decade had passed. It was also no longer the same version of the database, there were some migrations over time. So I had a meeting with one of their senior DBAs, who introduced me to the new data challenges they were facing. Together we accessed the production database and she started to use familiar handmade created stored procedures to check the information. I said something like “wait a minute, I know these stored procedures”. For decades I used optimized administration code, packed in stored procedures, for my consulting services. To speed up my analysis within my clients. And there they were, my own stored procedures. 

The client DBA told me she had no idea where they come from, but they used every day. I asked her to open the code there were comments with my name, email and so on. This is what happened: 10 years before, I had to copy my code to someone’s pc to then deploy it to the SQL Servers. I asked the person to delete de code, I always clean the all thing when the job is over. But that person kept the code and the all team started to use it, what happened for years.

I didn't mind, I even found an honor. One more proof that I did a good job. And I helped modernize the code, which they didn't know how to do. In fact, they did not know how to remove the comments hehehehe... 

Today these procedures, and many others, are published on my GitHub: https://github.com/Rodrigossz/MSSQL . All updated up to SQL 2016, the last version I did a job like that.

Do not miss the other chapters of this series of articles on the "Adventures " of a DBA:

Chapter 1: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/chapter-1-9112001-rodrigo-souza/

Chapter 2: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/chapter-2-update-without-where-rodrigo-souza/