Less is More

This week I had to bring back to life an environment I'd kept "frozen" for more than a year because of a revived project, kinda like Demolition Man. I've cleared a server to host this environment and thought I had a creative idea:
Nowadays I use NetApp storage (through iScsi) for this server, mainly because of the snapshot option, but this server has also a local disk that can accommodate the database. So I've decided to use the local disk - I get to keep the environment I had on this server before, the robocopy is much faster and I won't need snapshots for this environment anyway since it's for reference purposes only, not for development.

Do you know this guy Murphy?
A few days after the environment was up I've discovered that a couple of ApEx applications that were developed on this environment weren't kept anywhere else, so I had to export them and then import to the environment where the rest of project will be developed. Yes, I know, someone has real bad development practices, but, as my boss told me, part of my job is to clean the mess others make. So I've tried to open ApEx - nothing, a blank page. Now, you see, when those ApEx applications were developed ApEx was relatively new, actually, this old environment had an ApEx 2.0 (when it was still referred to as HTMLDB) schema as well as an ApEx 2.2 schema, and the only version to ever reach production was 2.2, so at first I thought there might be some misconfiguration of the iAS server or something like this. After exhausting the few ideas I had regarding misconfiguration I've tried to export the applications using APIs and got a strange error message about a missing datafile.
Well, you learn new things each day, it turns out that even if you can see the tablespace's definition and see the package specs for packages in it, it doesn't necessarily mean that the datafile for the tablespace is present.
It turns out that when I recreated the control file for the database I didn't have the datafile for the ApEx tablespace in the template script (remember it was new at the time). I'd expect the database to shout at me something like "man! you're missing a datafile" instead of just generating some nonexistent path for the missing datafile and going around acting like everything's ok.
God I wish I'd used the NetApp option.

I had two options:
1. Try to re-integrate the additional datafile into the database.
2. Restore the database again.
Now I get to the meaning of the title of this post. Re-integrating the datafile, if successful, will save precious copy time and giving up on a challenge is against my nature (and against this of another DBA from my team who tried to help me). But, during copy time I can do other things and this re-integration thing didn't look like it has high odds, and so we would probably end up with the second option anyway.
So, what I'm trying to say here is that being a good sysadmin doesn't always mean you have to solve any single problem, sometimes you just have to pick the more efficient course of action even if it is the more trivial one, even if it means you leave a problem unsolved. In life you have to pick your fights wisely.