I have a confession to make: Historically speaking, I don’t like deployments. I dread them with an unavoidable pessimism that asks “so what is THIS going to break?”

Now, I have worked with a lot of smart people who knew how to write some fabulous code. I don’t doubt that one bit. But I’ve also worked in several places where that code wasn’t rigorously tested before it was time to be deployed in Production. Maybe the business wanted a fix deployed immediately. Maybe the deployment instructions were incomplete. Maybe velociraptors invaded your workplace.

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For most of my career I’ve been the only DBA, which means each and every time one of my colleagues encountered a perception that the database is slow, they would form the words “Hey Jeff. . .” As Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility. Which is another way of saying in times of strife, both real and imagined, your Inbox and Voicemail get flooded.

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