Andy Leonard tells a story whose moral is that you need to keep track of what you deploy:
But this had to be done.
Right now.I thanked Geoff and hung up the phone. I then made another judgment call and exercised yet more of my ETL Architect authority. I assigned the PrUAT ticket to myself, logged into PrUAT, executed the patch, copied the output of the execution to the Notes field of the ticket (as we’d trained all DBAs and Release Management people to do), and then manually verified the patch was, in fact, deployed to PrUAT.
I closed the ticket and called my boss. “Done. And verified,” I said. My boss replied, “Good,” and hung up. He passed the good news up the chain.
A funny thing happened the next morning. And by “funny,” I mean no-fun-at-all. My boss called and asked, “Andy? I thought you said the patch was was deployed to PrUAT.” I was a little stunned, grappling with the implications of the accusation. He continued, “The process failed again last night and vendor checks were – again – not cut.” I finally stammered, “Let me check on it and get back to you.”
It’s a good story and really sells the idea that you have to track deployment details, including when you’re doing manual deployments.