part 1<\/a>, how many Oracle DBAs are living in a perpetual state of self-criticism because they don’t apply quarterly patch updates consistently? Perhaps if everyone realised we’re facing the same problems and that the vast majority *aren’t* applying the patches (at least not consistently), we might be able to assess our work more realistically? Or how about the DBAs who bemoan their lot because they still have to support some (shock! horror!) Oracle 8.1.7 databases when everyone knows that 10g has been around for years and we should all be using that?<\/p>\n2) It stops problems being addressed. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon at a couple of troubled customer sites I’ve worked at in the past. Everyone is frightened of telling the truth because they\u2019re worried that if the truth comes out there\u2019ll be trouble. But I\u2019ve always found that exposing the truth tends to lead to a result that really shouldn\u2019t be surprising. Once the true nature of your problems has been exposed, maybe something can be *done* about them? Oh, and this point leads into the more specific point 3 …<\/p>\n
3) It breeds risk. The ostrich-like behaviour of thinking that RAC or SRDF are complete disaster recovery solutions because words like ‘Unbreakable’ are bandied around or simply because you paid extra money to have them isn’t just a bit silly and deluded, it means that when someone *does* drop a table one day, you won’t have protected the business against that risk. All the fine words in the world won’t help you then.<\/p>\n
4) (Fill in your own here ….)<\/p>\n
If you want to close the gap, there’s no better tool than telling the truth. Although life can never be about unfettered honesty (maybe you *should* just say you like that new jumper your Auntie bought you for Christmas), I’ve always believed that truth is one of the most powerful weapons you can wield in the IT Systems arena.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Time to wrap things up (if you’ll excuse the festive pun). Not because there aren’t numerous other examples of the gap between accepted wisdom and reality that I could laugh or sigh at, but because I want to revisit some old topics in the next week or so and then take a break for a… Continue reading The Reality Gap (5) – Conclusion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1337,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/04\/the-reality-gap-2-disaster-recovery\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":0},"title":"The Reality Gap (2) – Disaster Recovery","date":"November 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm going to keep this one short and sweet because I've talked about it before. Because it's based around a single shared database, RAC will not (and was never designed to) protect you from Database corruption Erroneous updates or deletes by a user (or DBA!) More to the point, all\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 16 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1371,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/24\/the-reality-gap-4-its-never-the-san\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":1},"title":"The Reality Gap (4) – It’s never the SAN","date":"December 24, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I've left one of my favourite topics for the penultimate episode of this mini-series. The more sites you work at and the more performance problems you work on, the more you begin to learn the one essential truth of modern system architecture. It's never the SAN. Here's a true story.\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 11 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1325,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/27\/i-was-a-danish-stunt-double\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":2},"title":"I was a Danish Stunt Double","date":"September 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"... or is it a Scottish Stunt Double? I'm not sure. I had originally planned to attend only the afternoon part of next week's OUG Scotland conference. That way I would be able to spend the morning in work and still catch a few presentations I want to see. However,\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 4 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1330,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/27\/the-reality-gap-1-software-maintenance\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":3},"title":"The Reality Gap (1) – Software Maintenance","date":"October 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"It's so long now since the OUG Scotland Conference and I ended up leaving early because I wasn't feeling too good so I'm not going to attempt a review of the day. I asked a few others what they thought afterwards and the general view was that the day was\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 28 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1339,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/06\/the-reality-gap-3-a-single-instance-per-server\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":4},"title":"The Reality Gap (3) – A Single Instance per Server","date":"November 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"There will probably be about four or five of these posts in total. This is one I didn't mention in the original presentation because I didn't feel I could do it justice and because there was someone I wanted to have the right to reply. Step forward Tom Kyte.By coincidence,\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 15 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1358,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/19\/back-to-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":1372,"position":5},"title":"Back to reality …","date":"November 19, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"... and in surprisingly good shape. OK, it was a bit of an insane weekend sleep-wise, but the flight back wasn't too traumatic, neither was Scotland failing to reach Euro 2008 (well done, lads - great effort) and I tumbled into work only a little bit late today.So, what to\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 13 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}