Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, kids. Let me put down my coffeeâthe kind that's brewed strong enough to dissolve a spoon, not your half-caff-soy-latte-with-a-sprinkle-of-existential-dreadâand take a look at this... this bulletin.
Oh, this is precious. MyDumper "takes backup integrity to the next level" by... creating checksums.
Next level. Bless your hearts.
You know what we called checksums back in my day? We called it Tuesday. That wasn't a "feature," it was the bare-minimum entry fee for not getting hauled into the data center manager's office to explain why the entire company's payroll vanished into the ether. We were doing parity checks on data transfers when the only "cloud" was the plume of smoke coming from the lead system architect's pipe.
This whole article reads like someone just discovered fire and is trying to patent it. "The last thing you want is to discover your data is corrupted during a critical restore." Ya think? That's like saying the last thing a pilot wants to discover is that the wings were an optional extra. This isn't some profound insight, it's the fundamental premise of the entire job. A job, I might add, that used to involve wrestling with reel-to-reel tape drives the size of a small refrigerator.
You want to talk about backup integrity? Let me tell you about integrity. Integrity is running a 12-hour batch job written in COBOL, fed into the mainframe on a stack of punch cards you prayed was in the right order. Integrity is physically carrying a set of backup tapes in a lead-lined briefcase to an off-site vault because "off-site" meant a different building, not just another availability zone. We had a physical, plastic ring we had to put on the tape reel to allow it to be written to. No ring, no write. You kids and your 'immutable storage' probably think that's a life hack.
This often-overlooked feature [âŠ]
"Often-overlooked." Of course it's overlooked! You're all too busy disrupting synergy in your open-plan offices to read the manual. We had manuals. Binders, three inches thick, filled with glorious dot-matrix printouts. You read them. Cover to cover. Or you were fired. There were no "often-overlooked" features, only "soon-to-be-unemployed" DBAs.
This "MyDumper" tool... cute name. Sounds friendly. We had tools with names like IEBGENER, ADABAS, and CICS. They sounded like industrial machinery because that's what they were. They didn't have a -M option. They had 300 pages of JCL (Job Control Language) that you had to get exactly right, or the entire system would just sit there, blinking a single, mocking green cursor at you from across the room.
You're celebrating a checksum on a logical dump. We were validating tape headers, checking block counts, and running restores to a test LPAR on a different machine just to be sure. And we did it all through a 3270 terminal that rendered text in one color: searing green on soul-crushing black.
So, it's wonderful that your newfangled tools are finally catching up to the basic principles we established on DB2 and IMS back in 1985. It really is. Keep exploring those command-line flags. You're doing great. Maybe next month you'll write another breathless post about the "revolutionary" concept of transaction logging.
Just try not to hurt yourselves. The adults need the systems to stay up. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go explain to a DevOps intern why they can't just rm -rf the archive logs. Again.