Some call me.... Gozer

DBA, Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, for short we will just call the DBA at my job Gozer. It fits, its vaguely amusing oh and according to Wikipedia Gozer is hebrew for "surgeon who performs circumcisions" which well makes it even more amusing even though pretty unlikely that it is true. It's not that I dislike Gozer it's just that Gozer is an adamant believer in doing nothing new, the fact that Gozer questions us at every turn can be good as it makes us check and double check what we are doing before we come talk to Gozer. However in the long run all it means is that we try to do as much as we can in code just so that we don't have to interact with Gozer because every time we do I'm pretty sure a software fairy dies.

Here is an example of an interaction with Gozer, today I had to run a bunch of updates to add security groups to for a client. This is a continuation of what happened last week when I finally realized just how "advanced" data replication is in Oracle. I have these four files that I needed to run, in one of the files there was two updates that combined equalled a little over 70,000 rows. Gozer's suggestion was that we just pull those larger updates out of the file and run them with replication turned off. I didn't really like that but truthfully one shouldn't argue with a sumerian God. Even so I brought up the suggestion that maybe Gozer the Gozerian should just turn off replication and then run my little script. This must have caused Gozer much uneasiness as Gozer then asked me not once but FOUR times if I was sure the script was correct and if I had tested it. The conversation went a lot like so:

[Once]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Twice]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Thrice]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

[Fourth time]
"Are you sure this is correct, did you test this?"

"Yes"

After the fourth time I told Gozer just do whatever you feel most comfortable doing, which meant that we did it manually because in the scripture laid down by Gozer "Scripts can make mistakes but humans cannot." Dwell on that for awhile. So Gozer then copied three to four updates at a time and ran them in both databases, then verified that the row counts matched. The only thing that seemed more ludicrous was that Gozer thought Gozer was being careful and that keeping track of which updates had been run in Gozer's mind was much SAFER than running a script that had been tested in two other databases.

Remember "Scripts can make mistakes but humans cannot."