Man, talk about your all time screw-ups!!
OK, here’s what happened. I got a ticket the other day to truncate a table in a prod DB. Simple enough, right? So I wrote the guy and said, are you sure you want me to truncate this table? He said, yeah, it’s taking up over half of our space. I said ok, just give me a couple mins. So I connected and truncated the table.
Well, then I get a call like 10mins later and the guy was frantic. What happened to my data? Well, you told me to truncate the table. NOT ALL OF IT!!! So this is a valuable lesson isn’t it? Always be sure what you’re asking for and never assume. I of course didn’t assume anything. We get tickets to truncate entire DBs even all the time so it’s not that big of a deal for us. Anyway, just be aware that many users have a completely different database vocabulary than you do.
Is this industry fun or what?
Man! That’s rough.
To be fair, in hindsight I don’t think even the most careful, most scrupulous DBA could have caught that vocab mis-alignment.
Michael J Swart
Did you then get a ticket to do a restore?
I remind my team to avoid taking users’ requests or descriptions of an issue too literally, i.e. ask them exactly what they are/aren’t seeing, what results they want, etc. For example, we will get a report along the lines of “last night’s ETL job for ABC failed” when it didn’t fail, the problem is in the user’s query… they just assumed when their query returned no rows that it must be due to no data in the database, and that must be due to a failed ETL job. You’ll get sent running in circles by these requests if your first response is to investigate a user’s uninformed diagnosis.