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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