Normally for April 1st I’d try to post something a bit more lighthearted but with the state of the world at the moment I thought I would give you something a bit more topical to do. This month I’d like you to work on your continuity plans. Now, this is not the same as a database recovery plan. It’s all well and good if you can do operational recovery but that’s just the start of things.

Your homework is to come up with a plan for each of these situations, or if your company already has one make sure you know it and if at all possible you’ve tested it. Also, start with a plan, then figure out how long it will take. If this is outside of your normal recovery objectives, then you need to either re-plan, or renegotiate.

• Someone (could be a developer, could just as easily be you) accidentally deletes every row from a table.
• A server was rebooted as part of an upgrade and now it won’t come back up. You need to re-create it.
• There was some massive flooding in your area and your data center is under water. (This happened in NY not that long ago.) Not only are all of the servers in your data center gone, but any tapes, papers, etc in that building are also destroyed. Note: You don’t have to be able to do everything yourself but make sure you can re-create all of your database servers, from scratch, with only information that isn’t in the data center.
• There is a measles outbreak at your company. All of the DBAs are sick. Is everything documented well enough that a contractor can be brought in and at least function?
• There is a massive world wide pandemic and everyone has to work from home. Do they have the capability? Do they have practice? Probably not your responsibility, but do you have the bandwidth?

 
I realize that most of these are pretty unlikely (except maybe that first one) but the whole purpose of this series is to try things out you will probably need eventually, or things that while unusual, you don’t have time to try it for the first time when it happens.

Good luck, stay safe, and happy planning.