Oracle Expert

In large financial organisations, there are normally separate entities responsible for each separate areas/components within IT.Network team, UNIX team,Windows team, Oracle team, Sybase team, Storage team and the list goes on.

However there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with an issue that falls in the grey area of responsibility between groups, and when noone would claim ownership of the issue, leaving the business exposed. A simple issue, which falls under this category, could take weeks to resolve, simply by lack of ownership. The challenge here is to define the problem clearly, notify and engage relevant cross teams, highlight risks and find a solution.

Unfortunately, when ownership of a problem is unclear, there is a tendency to point a finger or cast a blame on someone else. Rather than the usual “not my problem” shoulder shrug, a more refreshing approach would be to take the opportunity to learn about how these different departments interlink, enhance our own problem-solving ability by facts findings and at the end, posses the most information about the issue, and how to solve it.

I experienced this first hand, when by chance I spotted a large, relatively high profile Oracle database which has not had a successful full backup (to tape) for weeks. The normal course of action by DBA team is to rerun backup jobs until it is successful. The problem with this particular database is that even on a sunny day, a full backup will take up to 24 hours to complete. So reruns have been clashing with incremental backups. A mess.

So, escalated issue to the DBA team, Tape Storage Team, Business/Application team, Infrastructure Manager. The initial reaction was quite disappointing :

• Business/Application team: “this is a DBA problem”
• DBAs: “this is a tape storage problem”
• Tape Storage team: “you are backing up a ridiculous amount of data to tape over the network, what do you expect?”

It took a lot of emails, phone calls, instant messaging to engage everyone and to get everyone to realize that there is not a single team solely responsible. The point is, there is a problem which needs fxing, and it should be of everyone’s interest to get it fixed asap.

I am sure we will get this solved at the end. I am a Oracle Data architect with 18 years experience specialising in design and performance tuning. And I wonder how I got involved in this and ended up spending 2 days chasing up a backup issue. I suppose because I care and someone has to do it.