About two weeks ago I've started training a new Apps DBA (my replacement actually). However exciting, this mission (as I was warned) is very time consuming, it's not only the time spent on explaining what does a 'system' mean and the more specific niches of the system he will have to manage, but I also, as the new guy makes progress, have to show him how to deal with day to day issues, how to apply a document to the system and how to deal with annoying developers.
Again, as in the first part of Looking At The Mirror, I find myself recalling my own training a couple of years ago and, as reminded by a friend, I remember being pretty sure there's no way I'll be able to really do something productive like my predecessor did, I thought I might be able to bring the system up at most. Well, as it is with those things, I was able to do a bit more than that. One day you just realize you're able to handle the system on your own and even more than just 'handle'.
By the way, talking about bringing up systems, today the new guy brought up two development environments on his own, I had to explain some things I've skipped before as he went along but eventually the environments were alive and kicking.
And that's another thing worth mentioning. When you know what you know, everything looks trivial. It's only when you have to transfer your knowledge to someone else that you realize how much experience you've accumulated and how tricky this all system thing is.
The bottom line is that there's really no way of transferring all you know, you can pass part of this in documents you've written, you can give oral explanations and tips, but eventually experience is the best teacher and being thrown into the deep cold water of a system crash(which will probably happen the next time I'm on vocation( - Voodoo part)) is sometimes better than weeks of explanations.
I'm pretty curious to see how the new guy handles the real stuff. For instance, if everything goes on as planned, this week he will watch while I upgrade an EBS database to 10g and in the next upgrading phase I expect him to do it on his own (well, maybe with SOME help).
Things are definitely going to get interesting... for both of us.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Looking At The Mirror (1)
This week I've been interviewing candidates for a programmer's position.
Up until now I've always sat on the other side of the table, so it felt strange to be the one asking the questions and not the one trying to impress by answering them.
This is not a simple task.
When you grade a candidate at the end of the interview you(or at least I) not only consider his ability to answer your questions in a satisfactory way, but, inevitably, you also think whether you would grade yourself high given the considerations you've applied, I think this shouldn't be a factor and neither the fact that you tend to sympathize more with people who have a similar background to your own background. Well, we're all just human.
Actually the considerations I've applied in many of the interviews are even more "unprofessional":
The interview consists of two parts, in the first, an HR representative asks personality questions and in the second the professional interviewer(me) asks professional questions. But actually , by the time we get to the professional part you've already formed quite a firm opinion of the candidate since virtues like the ability to operate as part of a team or the ability to quickly grasp new technologies are all part of being a good programmer(and most other technological positions as well). So sometimes the professional questions are asked only in order to validate what you've already realized about a candidate.
You can probably say it's not fair to decide on a person's future (a bit dramatic but true sometimes nonetheless) based on a first impression, that's true, but life's tough and in reality our interactions with other people are often based merely on first impressions. Besides, the interview has only limited time so first impression is mostly what you have.
Up until now I've always sat on the other side of the table, so it felt strange to be the one asking the questions and not the one trying to impress by answering them.
This is not a simple task.
When you grade a candidate at the end of the interview you(or at least I) not only consider his ability to answer your questions in a satisfactory way, but, inevitably, you also think whether you would grade yourself high given the considerations you've applied, I think this shouldn't be a factor and neither the fact that you tend to sympathize more with people who have a similar background to your own background. Well, we're all just human.
Actually the considerations I've applied in many of the interviews are even more "unprofessional":
The interview consists of two parts, in the first, an HR representative asks personality questions and in the second the professional interviewer(me) asks professional questions. But actually , by the time we get to the professional part you've already formed quite a firm opinion of the candidate since virtues like the ability to operate as part of a team or the ability to quickly grasp new technologies are all part of being a good programmer(and most other technological positions as well). So sometimes the professional questions are asked only in order to validate what you've already realized about a candidate.
You can probably say it's not fair to decide on a person's future (a bit dramatic but true sometimes nonetheless) based on a first impression, that's true, but life's tough and in reality our interactions with other people are often based merely on first impressions. Besides, the interview has only limited time so first impression is mostly what you have.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Time To Let Go
In job interviews you sometimes get asked about your bad qualities, among other things I usually mention me being a "too hard trier". It might seem like me trying to be a smart ass and slip a good quality as a bad one, but I really do think I sometimes try too hard.
I bet everyone knows this thing when you sit for hours trying to solve a problem just to get frustrated, go home and wake up with the now trivial solution the next morning. And that's exactly what I'm talking about, of course it's great to come up with a solution just when you're about to give up, but isn't it even better to skip the frustration part?
I don't really know the exact neurological explanation but a good night's sleep or even setting your mind to something else definitely triggers some processes in this head of ours that help us see the problem in a different light, and that's always a good thing. It's like when you try to remember the name of a song/movie/book and can't pinpoint it no matter how hard you try, but it will always pop into your mind later without the slightest effort.
This approach actually goes along well with what I've written in a previous post about counting on luck but somehow when it comes to letting go and letting nature do it's magic I seem to stay stubborn.
I'll try to continue my self-education and my advice to everyone who has a similar issue is to do the same, sometimes it just doesn't worth the trouble (but sometimes it does...).
I bet everyone knows this thing when you sit for hours trying to solve a problem just to get frustrated, go home and wake up with the now trivial solution the next morning. And that's exactly what I'm talking about, of course it's great to come up with a solution just when you're about to give up, but isn't it even better to skip the frustration part?
I don't really know the exact neurological explanation but a good night's sleep or even setting your mind to something else definitely triggers some processes in this head of ours that help us see the problem in a different light, and that's always a good thing. It's like when you try to remember the name of a song/movie/book and can't pinpoint it no matter how hard you try, but it will always pop into your mind later without the slightest effort.
This approach actually goes along well with what I've written in a previous post about counting on luck but somehow when it comes to letting go and letting nature do it's magic I seem to stay stubborn.
I'll try to continue my self-education and my advice to everyone who has a similar issue is to do the same, sometimes it just doesn't worth the trouble (but sometimes it does...).
Friday, January 4, 2008
Just Tell Me What Did I Do Wrong
Know that thing when your girlfriend(or wife, or whatever) starts acting like a walking icicle because you've done something to upset her? So you also know that she will put you to the test of discovering your error yourself. No matter what exactly you did you will get the same chill tone. Well, who understands women anyway?
But I've expected code to be more friendly (it's mostly written by men after all).
OK, I get it, you supply me with a wonderfully written piece of code and if I'm unable to figure out the correct parameters or set the environment correctly then I'm the stupid one here and that's my problem to deal with. But really, isn't that what Error Handling is for?
Had a variety of error handling related issues lately, here are just some of them:
1. A few weeks ago I've tried to install an R12 Vision database. After copying the installation CD (the very first phase) the installer window have just vanished. The log did contain an error code but with no explanation whatsoever and I haven't found anything on Metalink, so I tried again and this time I saw that just before crashing the installer executes bootstrap.cmd. So I tried to run it myself and got a java error stack with an error message saying something about "Unable to open a window" (I don't really remember the exact formulation right now), with no other apparent choice I've started decompiling the java code together with my team leader (who used to be an Apps DBA as well). At last we've discovered a code section where an error wasn't handled, pleased with ourselves we've logged an SR.
An unhandled error is bad enough but apparently the real problem was that the Staging Area wasn't set correctly, that's definitely my bad but how complicated it is to check the validity of the Staging Area before launching the installer and throwing totally unrelated errors at me?
2. I've noticed that it doesn't matter what's wrong, if running adcfgclone on the database tier it will probably fail with the same error stating something about "Error returned while creating control files" and an RW-50004 error code. If you're lucky the log file will have some clues, if not you'll have to start debugging Oracle's code. I got this same error for problems with an Oracle script which is part of the whole process, for problems with starting the database listener and even for a corrupted database, non of which are really related specifically to the creation of control files. And I'm pretty sure this error shows itself in much more cases. I think it's totally reasonable to expect an error message when the problem appears, instead, all errors seem to propagate to a single line of code where the adcfgclone just won't take it anymore.
3. Had to modify the virtual IP(just the IP, host name stays the same) of my load balanced OID server - turns out that's not as simple as one would expect. From what I know up until now (haven't really resolved this issue yet) it seems that the IP is hardcoded in some configuration file or maybe even in the Meta-Repository database, that's odd. Maybe I'll write about it in another post when I'll have more idea. Anyway, in the process I've discovered a script that's supposed to do just that, it even has it's own folder directly under ORACLE_HOME. This fact made me suspicious at once since it makes this script look like a late add-on which wasn't considered with much thought. The code inside really stands up to the expectations, it seems no one have ever tested the code. It looks something like this:
...
if
echo bad thing 1 happened
goto end
...
if
echo bad thing 2 happened
goto end
...
...
:end
exit
Doesn't take a cmd expert to understand that running the script as it is won't show you any error messages (unless you're a really quick reader) and it will actually close your cmd window (why?!).
Well, I think that concludes my case.
But I've expected code to be more friendly (it's mostly written by men after all).
OK, I get it, you supply me with a wonderfully written piece of code and if I'm unable to figure out the correct parameters or set the environment correctly then I'm the stupid one here and that's my problem to deal with. But really, isn't that what Error Handling is for?
Had a variety of error handling related issues lately, here are just some of them:
1. A few weeks ago I've tried to install an R12 Vision database. After copying the installation CD (the very first phase) the installer window have just vanished. The log did contain an error code but with no explanation whatsoever and I haven't found anything on Metalink, so I tried again and this time I saw that just before crashing the installer executes bootstrap.cmd. So I tried to run it myself and got a java error stack with an error message saying something about "Unable to open a window" (I don't really remember the exact formulation right now), with no other apparent choice I've started decompiling the java code together with my team leader (who used to be an Apps DBA as well). At last we've discovered a code section where an error wasn't handled, pleased with ourselves we've logged an SR.
An unhandled error is bad enough but apparently the real problem was that the Staging Area wasn't set correctly, that's definitely my bad but how complicated it is to check the validity of the Staging Area before launching the installer and throwing totally unrelated errors at me?
2. I've noticed that it doesn't matter what's wrong, if running adcfgclone on the database tier it will probably fail with the same error stating something about "Error returned while creating control files" and an RW-50004 error code. If you're lucky the log file will have some clues, if not you'll have to start debugging Oracle's code. I got this same error for problems with an Oracle script which is part of the whole process, for problems with starting the database listener and even for a corrupted database, non of which are really related specifically to the creation of control files. And I'm pretty sure this error shows itself in much more cases. I think it's totally reasonable to expect an error message when the problem appears, instead, all errors seem to propagate to a single line of code where the adcfgclone just won't take it anymore.
3. Had to modify the virtual IP(just the IP, host name stays the same) of my load balanced OID server - turns out that's not as simple as one would expect. From what I know up until now (haven't really resolved this issue yet) it seems that the IP is hardcoded in some configuration file or maybe even in the Meta-Repository database, that's odd. Maybe I'll write about it in another post when I'll have more idea. Anyway, in the process I've discovered a script that's supposed to do just that, it even has it's own folder directly under ORACLE_HOME. This fact made me suspicious at once since it makes this script look like a late add-on which wasn't considered with much thought. The code inside really stands up to the expectations, it seems no one have ever tested the code. It looks something like this:
...
if
echo bad thing 1 happened
goto end
...
if
echo bad thing 2 happened
goto end
...
...
:end
exit
Doesn't take a cmd expert to understand that running the script as it is won't show you any error messages (unless you're a really quick reader) and it will actually close your cmd window (why?!).
Well, I think that concludes my case.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)