Uncommon Sense

I had the pleasure not so long ago to work with a fantastic Program Manager called Declan. He had coined the term "Uncommon Sense" in response to the fact that "Common Sense" seems to be something of a rarity in todays IT landscape. Here's a point of example.

In this weeks development team meeting we had on the agenda the issue of Disaster Recovery Planning. To cut a long story short our Data Warehouse Manager does not have confidence that our Tech Support colleages on level 2 can reliably backup and recover our data warehouse databases.

I'd like to say that this is the first time I worked in an IT site where confidence in backup and recovery was low but especially in these days of outsourcing I'm afraid that I can't, but that's a topic probably best explored in a separate post.

Because we cannot trust our backups the data warehouse manager has insisted that we keep in our staging database effectively every row that has ever been applied to the data warehouse as an insurance policy. FYI our warehouse contains, in parts, data over 10 years old.

There are lots of reasons why the DRP strategy will fail which I won't bore you with now but the part of the discussion that really tells me that the lunatics are running the asylum is this.

Our staging server is in the same data center as our data warehouse server. So please Qantas, can I ask you that when one of your badly serviced 747's falls out of the sky onto our data center can you make sure that you land on the data warehouse box and not the staging box or vica versa - but please not both. Cheers.