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Embracing Mistakes
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I still remember the first big mistake I made at work. I was working as an MSSQL DBA, and although it was many years ago, the memory is still vivid in my mind. We were dealing with database corruption on a “large” production database (large for that time, ha!). The server was critical, and production had either stopped or was severely impacted.
There was an intense debate between me and the senior DBAs (I was just starting my career back then) regarding the issue. The corruption occurred on SQL Server 2000, and based on the facts we had, I believed it was caused by actual disk corruption, not database level corruption. I don’t recall exactly where I read about it, but the problem matched something I had seen before — disk corruption on some sectors, Windows server NT 4.0. One possible solution, although risky due to potential data loss, was to run the CHKDSK command. The downside? Scanning the entire disk would take forever — it was “huge” by 2004 standards, lol.
Long story short, my solution sounded plausible, and to my surprise, a group of three senior DBAs agreed. So, we went ahead with it.
A Shocking Revelation
The senior DBAs went to lunch while I stayed behind, hungry but glued to the server rack, monitoring the situation…
