The three most important things in IT

Backup, backup and backup. If you're not persuaded, ask one of our customers who happily stopped performing regular backups last May (the 23rd, to put the dots on the "i"s). A couple of days ago their hard disk went F.U.B.A.R. and their data vanished into thin air. Think twice before you say "I'll backup it tomorrow".

No hints on F.U.B.A.R.? Don't worry, not even Ray Tango knew what it meant. You can always ask Gabriel Cash fore more info.
I wonder why every programming example uses "foo" and "bar"...

Always watch your steps

Back to work! A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, one of my peers dropped a couple of the most important production tables in the most important application of our most important customer. I thought it would be a tough act to follow... till today, even if I was only working on small and relatively unimportant tables. So, when you are testing a system, ALWAYS double check which one you are working on.

Luckily, we believe in the three divinities of software: backup, backup and backup, so everything went back to normal unnoticed.

Database on a diet

Today we stripped (and archived, of course) old data from one of our production databases... bringing it from 110GB to about 15GB. Let's say it was about time.