Life as a DBA

I rolled off my old project last year. They seemed to be out of money, at least for me. I did a short stint on an analysis gig. Then that job changed its requirements and I was again looking for work. My manager told me I could return to my old project, but in a different capacity. I would be on the DBA team.


So I reported to the lead DBA. He gave me a task. I hit the ground running and we figured out a problem that plagued the team for over a month. Win. My new team lead was going on a long vacation. He put me in charge of a database task. I was ready to make some progress.


Turns out I don't have the privileges to do the things I need to do in the development database. There are some other DBAs that handle that. Okay. I did some prep work for testing. Then I scheduled up a meeting with the DBAs in charge. We went nowhere fast. They apparently would run scripts on our behalf. Ok...


I had another developer write up some scripts. The DBA pulled it up onto the UNIX box and he kept getting Korn shell errors. The file was there. Ksh kept complaining that it could not find the file. I left the DBA to figure out the details. Turns out he uploaded the file in the wrong mode. The lines were terminated incorrectly. Doh.


I decided to take a look at the script files. The author put a tar file on the UNIX box. I grabbed a copy and tried to extract the files. He gave me instructions to extra via a tar -cvf. I tried a couple times. Tar kept giving me errors. This seemed like deja vu. Luckily I stepped back and read up on how tar works. Turns out that command was similar to the compression. I needed a tar -xvf. And I was off to the races.