This was such a fun thread to read. I love seeing people just come up with solutions however inelegant. I do this myself: get something working and then circle back to make it more maintainable etc.
While as a new DBA for Microsoft SQL server on a team of very seasoned DBAs with decades of experience each I wrote a small Python script to fix a replication bug that MS refused to fix.
The bug iirc was something related to initial snapshot settings such that by default a setting was set to off so replication would fail. They would normally go and edit this file manually when this happened. When it really blew up it could be editing this file in tens of locations! It was just something they had consigned themselves to doing since it happened just infrequently enough for them not to invest time to fixing but when it did happen it could take an hour or so to do and yeah my noob self thought that’s far too tedious I am
not doing that.
The bug really should have been fixed by MS and the flag should have been set to on and my script would just find the relavent unc share and text file and basically do a find and replace of that line and toggled the flag. And then replication would work again. I could point the script to a server and it would figure out the path and do the work. All I then had to do was enumerate the servers that were affected and it was fixed in no time.
This fix was so popular when I showed it internally that they asked me to turn it into a GUI application. It was awesome. I learned a bit of C# and from what I heard a few years back my little tool was still in USE! Huzzah
While as a new DBA for Microsoft SQL server on a team of very seasoned DBAs with decades of experience each I wrote a small Python script to fix a replication bug that MS refused to fix.
The bug iirc was something related to initial snapshot settings such that by default a setting was set to off so replication would fail. They would normally go and edit this file manually when this happened. When it really blew up it could be editing this file in tens of locations! It was just something they had consigned themselves to doing since it happened just infrequently enough for them not to invest time to fixing but when it did happen it could take an hour or so to do and yeah my noob self thought that’s far too tedious I am not doing that.
The bug really should have been fixed by MS and the flag should have been set to on and my script would just find the relavent unc share and text file and basically do a find and replace of that line and toggled the flag. And then replication would work again. I could point the script to a server and it would figure out the path and do the work. All I then had to do was enumerate the servers that were affected and it was fixed in no time.
This fix was so popular when I showed it internally that they asked me to turn it into a GUI application. It was awesome. I learned a bit of C# and from what I heard a few years back my little tool was still in USE! Huzzah