Small but busy database group shares a network volume with this company’s CAD group, which of course has a gluttonous appetite for disk space. And in fact the database group keeps running out of room on the volume for new projects, which holds them up for hours every time until the network admins find ways to free up some space.

One day while everyone in the database group is waiting, fish on the team jokingly suggests to the supervisor that he could create a huge database of random characters, just to take up a few hundred megabytes on the shared volume. Then, whenever the databasers need some space, fish could delete a thousand records and they’d be back in business. “I could add the records back when we archived and deleted a finished project, and we’d never run out of room again,” jokes fish.

To his astonishment, she says, “Do it!”

For the next few years, one of fish’s unofficial functions was “DBA of the Disk-Filling Database.”

“I’m sure,” reflects fish, “we caused the CAD group to run out of space for their own files a few times. But neither they nor the network admins ever got wise to our little game. And, as predicted, our own group never ran out of disk space again.”

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