The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Yeah, I know, holidays are over. It snowed about four inches overnight here and it's still coming down a little. You'll forgive me for having that song running through my head.

Yesterday morning, before the storm started, we did a check through the house to make sure we were ready for a couple of days at home. It's Oklahoma. They do not deal well with snow, so we wanted to be sure we only went out on the roads if it was vital. Put in a bunch of wood for the furnace. A bunch of other stuff, including assuming there's a chance we'll lose power (again, Oklahoma, snow, not dealing well). It's not a lot different than the checks we do when tornadoes are on the way. It all goes back to a Navy saying: Prior planning prevents p*** poor performance. Apologies. The Navy can be a little bit profane.

However, this very much ties back in to data. Why have I always harped so much on the need for backups AND the need to test those backups by doing a restore? Because of the 6 Ps. Why did we set up a tiger team, an emergency response team, at my last job and hold quarterly practice sessions? 6 Ps. Why do I like automation and automated testing? 6 Ps.

Most of us will probably never have a major data outage. Your servers will run, just fine, your entire career. You'll never see a corrupted database, or it'll only be a nonclustered index that you can drop & recreate (honestly, the only corruption I've experienced in a database). You won't ever have to deal with the potential emergencies that could occur. For those of us so lucky, that's great. However, some of us, we're going to experience a true emergency. I'm here to tell you, if you don't prepare for it now, right now, when it happens, well, the last three of those Ps are likely to be the outcome. It is exceedingly hard to learn, on the fly, when your entire business is offline. So, adopt the 6 Ps (or, make it less profane and 5 Ps).

Grant Fritchey

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