The Certified DBA

“I’m not questioning your expertise,” Paul cautiously said to the Certified DBA, “it’s just that I’m just not used to requests with… this level of detail.”

Paul should have done what he was asked, exactly how he was asked to do it. After all, he was not an expert but just a lowly systems administrator. Fortunately, the Certified DBA made sure to keep him in his place.

“I would expect not,” smirked the Certified DBA, “system administrators generally don’t know how to tune for database performance, so I have to be very specific on the server configuration.”

The “configuration” that the Certified DBA was referring to was a rather complex set-up of disk partitions and RAID. Per his request, the server Paul was to set up should have six disks, each with ten partitions set-up. Corresponding partitions on disks 1, 3, and 5 were to be concatenated (not striped) to each other via RAID, while the partitions on disks 2, 4, and 6 served as mirrors of their corresponding partitions on disks 1, 2, and 5. All of these partitions were then to be mounted as directories (/p1, /p2, etc) in the file system.

continue reading: The Certified DBA – The Daily WTF.