Ah that time again to resolve to be better people in the new year.   Most last about as long as a snowflake in hell, but it is good to aspire to new goals.  With that in mind, here are a few New Year’s resolutions for DBAs.

1.  Understand that we don’t always need root (that’s a tough one right of the bat).

2.  Not to make nooses out of spare CAT5 cable and leave them on the network admin’s chair.

3.  Take advantage of the fact that Oracle put a Google search right inside the new Metalink.

4. Drop weight by ridding ourselves of the Oracle 7.3 Backup & Recovery Handbook and all the other books we have from two-three versions back.   (Don’t laugh, I found a set of Oracle 5.1 and 6.0 manuals in my garage this year).

5. Not to take advantage of caller ID to ignore certain people just because they always ask long, involved and completely innocuous questions.

6. Not to wear my RTFM t-shirt to staff meetings.

7. Complete documentation, clearly, completely and on time to help offset #5

8. Not to beta test new versions of Oracle on production or QA servers (that is all I had left!)

9. Become good friends with the SAs and storage admins, you need all the allies you can get.

10. Learn to say no appropriately

And finally…

11. Resist the temptation to beat the developer with his own laptop when he brings you a 6-page query and complains “it runs slow”.

Happy New Year!!!

Merry Christmas to all, and may God bless you in the new year to come