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Darren New wrote:
> This is how you manage these things:
>
> Pretend you're not as smart as the person you're talking to, and you
> don't know as much. (I'll make it short and over-the-top to illustrate,
> but of course if you turn it into two pages you don't need to make it
> sound smarmy.) Assume that the guy is not stupid, but that he has
> requirements you aren't aware of.
>
> The first part says "Oh, have we changed what we're doing? Is that why
> you're changing stuff that works?"
>
> The second says "I know there are advantages to your way of doing it,
> but there are disadvantages, and you job is to weigh them and figure out
> whether it's worth the risk to get the advantages."
>
> The third part says "Here's a way to save face and not look like an
> idiot by reversing yourself. We can still make backups the way you want,
> and just not use them. And three months from now, when the system
> becomes unusable for an hour in the middle of the day because of your
> backups, you can tell me to stop doing it that way, as if I hadn't told
> you that in the first place three months ago."
>
> The fourth is "Please put in writing all the solutions to the problems
> you're causing, so I don't get blamed. If you don't know what I'm
> talking about, understand that I know more about this than you, and
> hence maybe you should take my advice."
>
> But if you do it politely, careful of his ego and humble in your
> criticism, it works pretty well. If you say "please explain to this poor
> ignorant peon why you're making such a boneheaded decision", you not
> only look better in the event that you're wrong, but you haven't ticked
> him off by being right. Especially if it goes back and forth a couple
> times, with him changing his story a little each time until he has been
> agreeing with you all along. :-)
In fairness, as I understand it the guy is an SQL Server expert, not an
Oracle expert.
Given that the "solution" I've been offered doesn't actually solve the
problem of interest anyway, I think I shall just quietly leave things as
they are. Pointing out what we could be doing differently is likely to
get me yelled at - especially as Oracle's own documentation hints that
exporting is a way to "backup" a small database.
(I really love the way it describes "small" as "less than, say, 50 GB".
I'd like to know in which universe 50 GB can be considered "small"...)
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