Who, me? Welcome once again, dear readers, to Who, Me? – The Register where once a week we hand over to our readers, such as yourself, so they can free themselves from times when things didn't quite go as planned.
Accidental DBA – Don't let your database be a black box
This week's confession comes from a reader we'll regomize as "Larry." A few years ago, Larry worked as an Oracle DBA for a healthcare provider in the US. He hadn't been a DBA very long so, in his words, he wasn't yet "all knowing or all mighty" – but he knew enough to get by and could ask intelligent questions of the older DBAs.
Then he got a Really Important Task™️. The business he worked for produced monthly reports on its membership, based on current and previous months. That monthly report was automated, but for some reason the annual report still required a manual process. Larry told who, me? that it involved "backing up the last two months, truncating said months, running an ad hoc job to populate it again so a report can be generated, and then finally restoring from the backup."
Obviously, this needs to become more efficient.
