© Laurenz Albe 2025
While I sometimes write about real-life problems I encounter in consulting sessions (see this example), I admit that curiosity and the desire to play are the motivation for many of my articles (like this one). So I am glad that a friend of mine, whose job as a DBA puts him on the front line every day, offered to let me quote from his (unreleased) memoirs. Finally, this is material…
© Laurenz Albe 2025
While I sometimes write about real-life problems I encounter in consulting sessions (see this example), I admit that curiosity and the desire to play are the motivation for many of my articles (like this one). So I am glad that a friend of mine, whose job as a DBA puts him on the front line every day, offered to let me quote from his (unreleased) memoirs. Finally, this is material that I hope will connect with all the hard-working souls out there! My friend insists on anonymity, hence the “bastard DBA from hell” in the title.
The bastard DBA from hell fights the deadlocks
I like being a DBA. The only problem are the people using the databases.
A week ago I get a call from accounting. The guy sounds like I stole his sandwich, “We get deadlocks all the time.”
“Well, don’t do it then.”, I tell him. I should have known that this kind of person wouldn’t listen to good advice.
“It’s your Postgre system that gives me these deadlock errors. So you fix them”.
“As you wish.”. >clickety click< “Ok, you shouldn’t get any more deadlock errors now.”
He mumbles something and hangs up. It didn’t sound like “thank you”. That’s fine with me. After all, I set his lock_timeout to 500.
The bastard DBA from hell fights table bloat
Yeaterday the guy from accounting called me again, in that accusing, complaining tone, “Our disk is 95% full.”
“I know, I got an alert from the monitoring system. Actually, I sent you guys an e-mail about it. 10 days ago.”
“Can’t you fix that?”
“Do you want me to extend the file system?”
“We have no more data in there than before. So why do we need a bigger disk?”
I tell him “hang on” and log into their system. >clickety click<
“Well, you got a 350GB table there that’s taking up all the space. But it’s 99% dead data... Did you create that prepared transaction a month ago and never commit it?” >clickety click< “There, gone now. Just run a VACUUM (FULL) on the table and you’ll be good.”
— * —
I thought I was rid of him, but I should have known that was not to be. The same voice, an hour later:
“VACUUM (FULL) says ‘out of disk space’.”
“Again — do you want me to extend the file system?”
I should have known that it was a mistake to be nice to the whiner. He decides to get nasty. Big mistake.
“Do your job and clean up the database.”
“As you wish.” >clickety click< “Ok, now you have got enough free disk space.”.
I hang up. There are few things as satisfying as a quick TRUNCATE when things get out of hand!