10 Essential Practices to Prevent DBA and Ops Disasters

1. Ensure changes are rollbackable and tested in identical environments

Operations is an experiential discipline; protect the environment and allow rollbacks.

2. Be extremely cautious with destructive operations

Examples of destructive commands include Oracle's

truncate table_name

,

delete table_name

,

drop table_name

, and Linux's

rm -r

. Use aliases like

alias rm='rm -i'

,

alias cp='cp -i'

,

alias mv='mv -i'

to add prompts.

3. Set informative command prompts

Before executing, know whether you are on primary or standby, current directory, schema, session, time, etc. For Oracle you can set

set sqlprompt 'RAC-node1-primary@10g>>'

. For Linux bash, customize PS1.

4. Backup and verify backup integrity

Backups are essential; distinguish cold vs hot, real‑time vs non‑real‑time, physical vs logical. Real‑time hot backups are needed for 24/7 OLTP, but also keep non‑real‑time backups to recover from logical errors. Always test backups by restoring to an empty database.

5. Maintain reverence for production environments

Adopt professional ethics similar to accountants; regularly run health checks (e.g., Oracle RDA, Linux password aging, network isolation).

6. Handle handovers and vacations carefully

When taking over work, repeatedly confirm change plans, document procedures, and verify details with the original operator before executing.

7. Build alerting and performance monitoring

Alerts notify you of anomalies promptly; monitoring provides historical performance data for trend analysis and proactive optimization.

8. Automations must be applied cautiously

Automatic failover solutions like Oracle Data Guard can cause data loss if a switchover occurs before replication completes.

9. Be meticulous and double‑check everything

Follow a disciplined checklist: notify stakeholders weeks in advance, review scripts on test machines, copy to production, verify steps, confirm with team, and monitor execution.

10. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Prefer built‑in system commands and simple scripts over complex third‑party tools; the native Linux CLI often provides the most efficient solution.

alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'