Session Surviving Change: Bringing Operations Professionalism to the IT World Andrew Cowie Track: Scaling and High Availability Date: Tuesday, April 19 Time: 10:30am - 11:15am Location: Ballroom G TrackBack Databases are the heart of modern IT, but ever increasing complexity means that people charged with maintaining such production systems face an impossible task: they need to spend time developing new ways to manage their platform, but are constantly fighting fires which prevent them from concentrating on the real challenges at hand. In essence, the solution to the problem is a human one. These issues are not unique to database administration, so this session takes a far reaching approach to addressing them. Expertise from software development, military operations, the scientific revolution, and even NASA are used. Three themes are dominant: we need a systematic way to learn from our experiences, bridging structure and flexibility is key, and above all, it is leadership which makes the difference. Using operations procedures for specific events such as database upgrades offers a breakthrough approach. A formidable tool is created when procedures are used in a way that resists bureaucracy while encouraging knowledge transfer and learning. You can foster a culture of operations professionalism not just for critical events like database upgrades, but around routine events too. Drawing lessons from diverse worlds, Cowie's presentation helps you achieve highly available systems by achieving high availability in the teams which maintain them. Download presentation file

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