Throwback Thursday: It seemed like the thing to do at the time
Database admin pilot fish is on call and sleeping soundly when his beeper goes off at 1 a.m.
But it's not an alert from monitoring software or from the trouble center. The phone number on the pager is one fish doesn't recognize.
He calls the number. It's a user who tells him that a job on the server is stuck, and he's not getting new rows into a table.
Bleary-eyed fish logs on and checks. Sure enough, the job has a problem. A single mouse click restarts the job, and it's working again.
But fish also notices in the log that the job has been stuck since 10:30 a.m. -- two days before.
"Yeah, it's been annoying," user explains when fish asks about it. "The stuck job has been paging me to tell me there's a problem every 15 minutes."