The Gunson Rules of Database Administration

Mark Atwood told me he would drown my cat if I didn’t submit a lightning talk proposal, so here it is. He said it had to be something interesting and non-technical, so I thought I could talk about my personal DBA rulebook that I’ve been compiling for months. It’s mostly a common-sense list of 10 or so dos and don’ts of being a DBA that I’ve realized over the years. It includes rules such as:

• When someone says, “oh, just test that on the production database”, don’t.

• Debugging and optimizing SQL is a fun and easy way to impress people.

• Monitor everything that could possibly go wrong so you can fix problems before anyone else notices.

• Insist on chocolate as payment for helping developers in case they believe you.