DBA pilot fish gets a message one Monday morning that the Puerto Rico database is ready to be set up. To which he responds, “Puerto Rico database?” Yes, he’s told, we need a database in Puerto Rico to handle our Spanish-speaking customers. We put together the server on Friday and flew it down, and now you need to set it up. It’s urgent, urgent, urgent!

So urgent that no one bothered to inform fish until now.

But he sets to work and quickly has everything configured. When he starts to build the materialized views, though, he’s hit with communication errors, repeatedly. He contacts the network people: What’s going on with the network? They reply: The network is fine. Fish provides documentation that the network is not fine. Networking continues to look for the problem.

Fish isn’t going to be able to finish the job until the communication errors go away, so he puts the entire matter on a back burner and waits to hear back from networking. Which he does — three months later.

The problem? The local link to the T1 connection in Puerto Rico wasn’t working. No one had felt the need to check beyond the T1 line itself, and the problem wasn’t discovered until someone in Puerto complained about trouble getting connections from the office.

Two hours later, the Puerto Rico database is finally up and running. The odd thing, fish notes, is that during those three months, no one had asked what was going on with that urgently needed database.

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