Chapter 6: 4 AM, Every Day

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. 

Another express edition of the DBA Tales From the Crypt.

 It was the first decade of the century and I was working in a small bank, with a startup look and feel. I was assigned to help someone from the back office area with a update process that should happen every day at 4 AM.

 This process was an important reference data update from the federal government, including routing numbers, holydays and so on. Someone had to open those files, validate manually and upload them into a client / server tool. Yes, not the best architecture, but that’s how the DEV team created. And for YEARS, this person, always the same person, did that process at 4 AM. Her life was organized around this process. There was never an error, but the data was not been updated.

So I went there 4 AM to see what the user was doing, to try to understand the problem. FOUR AM. There was also someone from the DEV team with me, he was not the original developer of the tool but was in charge at that time. And we did the basic: traces, logs and so on. And we found a simple bug in that piece of software. It was not doing anything with the files. For years. Since ever. That person was waking up at 3 AM to be in the office at 4 AM to run a process that was simply not doing anything. Zero.

 We never told her about it.

 Don't 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/

Chapter 3: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/chapter-3-wait-minute-rodrigo-souza/

Chapter 4: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/resilience-rodrigo-souza/

Chapter 5: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/chapter-4-run-rodrigo-souza/