7 ms·

Hey man, it’s agile, cloud, devops; we don’t value sys admins, dbas, or business analyst! We hire inexperienced devs and expect them to do it all! Experience?

Hey man, it’s agile, cloud, devops; we don’t value sys admins, dbas, or business analyst! We hire inexperienced devs and expect them to do it all! Experience? Bah! To expensive! This is the world we’ve got today.

zaphar 7y ago
If you read the thread it wasn't agile devops who caused the problem. It was a DBA following specific instructions from Oracle support. Which is like the polar opposites of what you describe. This company was screwed as soon as they did business with Oracle. A company whose entire business model is making things as inscrutable as possible so you'll pay them more money in support contracts.
- Jare 7y ago
  Oracle never told them company to NOT test the backups. That was the company's own doing (and demise). So the question is, why did the company not think of testing their backups, and generally doing a full validation of the system before committing to it for months and millions of $ in business? What sort of workflows, processes and culture in the company allowed this to happen? Probably the cheap sort.
  - jsiepkes 7y ago
    They are using Oracle so calling them cheap doesn't seem fitting.
    - Jare 7y ago
      As an old boss used to say, "cheap, but not as in 'inexpensive'". Too often, bad companies overspend in the wrong places and skimp on actually valuable stuff. It's amazing how a company doing this can still survive on appearances and inertia for years.
  - fencepost 7y ago
    What I got from reading the thread last night was that due to some quirk of oracle a test restore would have been a destructive overwrite of the active data. Not sure if that's due to oracle hosting or if that was an incorrect impression.
    - dfrage 7y ago
      If you can't do a full end-to-end backup and bare metal restore, you don't really have a backup. If this is indeed a "quirk" of Oracle Cloud, it's not fit for purpose.
  - zaphar 7y ago
    This is an outsourced cloud database. Oracle provides the backup systems for them. The kind of people who buy Oracle do it because they assume that because Oracle is charging them millions of dollars that Oracle is doing the right thing for them. I don't know all the details here but it is very easy for me to imagine that the Oracle cloud system was indicating all systems go on the backups front and they didn't know they that a reboot would make the backup/restore completely fail when the key was lost. This is in fact the very thing that a good agile devops shop will prevent by not relying on Oracle to handle it for them. That's why the comment I was replying too looked kneejerk and not the result of having read the article to me.

zaphar 7y ago

If you read the thread it wasn't agile devops who caused the problem. It was a DBA following specific instructions from Oracle support. Which is like the polar opposites of what you describe. This company was screwed as soon as they did business with Oracle. A company whose entire business model is making things as inscrutable as possible so you'll pay them more money in support contracts.

Jare 7y ago
Oracle never told them company to NOT test the backups. That was the company's own doing (and demise). So the question is, why did the company not think of testing their backups, and generally doing a full validation of the system before committing to it for months and millions of $ in business? What sort of workflows, processes and culture in the company allowed this to happen? Probably the cheap sort.
- jsiepkes 7y ago
  They are using Oracle so calling them cheap doesn't seem fitting.
  - Jare 7y ago
    As an old boss used to say, "cheap, but not as in 'inexpensive'". Too often, bad companies overspend in the wrong places and skimp on actually valuable stuff. It's amazing how a company doing this can still survive on appearances and inertia for years.
- fencepost 7y ago
  What I got from reading the thread last night was that due to some quirk of oracle a test restore would have been a destructive overwrite of the active data. Not sure if that's due to oracle hosting or if that was an incorrect impression.
  - dfrage 7y ago
    If you can't do a full end-to-end backup and bare metal restore, you don't really have a backup. If this is indeed a "quirk" of Oracle Cloud, it's not fit for purpose.
- zaphar 7y ago
  This is an outsourced cloud database. Oracle provides the backup systems for them. The kind of people who buy Oracle do it because they assume that because Oracle is charging them millions of dollars that Oracle is doing the right thing for them. I don't know all the details here but it is very easy for me to imagine that the Oracle cloud system was indicating all systems go on the backups front and they didn't know they that a reboot would make the backup/restore completely fail when the key was lost. This is in fact the very thing that a good agile devops shop will prevent by not relying on Oracle to handle it for them. That's why the comment I was replying too looked kneejerk and not the result of having read the article to me.