Let's talk about the second part of the title first. This was around the boom time of 'Four Horsemen of Nasdaq' and 'End of the World with Y2K'. Those were the hay days of DotCom bubble and the food of opportunity was plentiful. I was consulting on an implementation project for a Florida transportation company in the role of PeopleSoft Applications DBA. We were a team of two consultants overseen by an IT director. In those days, the security setup used to be nowhere near the today's hacker prone times and many folks in IT had complete access to even production environments.
On one fine summer morning, I was investigating a production support performance issue with our load-balanced application servers. Our IT director stopped by to inform me that we needed an urgent refresh of SPRD (Production Support) database. Since I was busy, we decided to assign that job to John (Name changed), the other consultant on the team. As I continued working, I suddenly started getting some PeopleTools errors. I logged on to SQL*Plus and queried the SYSADM schema where PeopleSoft stores all tools and applications tables. As I took the table count, to my utter disbelief, I found that the count kept dropping with each successive query execution. I ran next door to find John busy working on refresh. I asked him if he was by mistake dropping schema from production environment and his face turned white. Indeed the name SPRD was confused with PROD (Production). The rest can only be described as nightmarish couple of days that followed with lost productivity and of course the reputation.
That brings me to the Part II - Today's IT environment and What to do when you don't have sufficient access...
On one fine summer morning, I was investigating a production support performance issue with our load-balanced application servers. Our IT director stopped by to inform me that we needed an urgent refresh of SPRD (Production Support) database. Since I was busy, we decided to assign that job to John (Name changed), the other consultant on the team. As I continued working, I suddenly started getting some PeopleTools errors. I logged on to SQL*Plus and queried the SYSADM schema where PeopleSoft stores all tools and applications tables. As I took the table count, to my utter disbelief, I found that the count kept dropping with each successive query execution. I ran next door to find John busy working on refresh. I asked him if he was by mistake dropping schema from production environment and his face turned white. Indeed the name SPRD was confused with PROD (Production). The rest can only be described as nightmarish couple of days that followed with lost productivity and of course the reputation.
That brings me to the Part II - Today's IT environment and What to do when you don't have sufficient access...
