Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the place,

Not a server was stirring, ‘cept the database,

The DBAs sat in dim light, typing with care,

In hopes of how well the deployment would fare.

Their developers were nestled all snug in their beds,

Whilst visions of non-clustered indexes danced in their heads,

And low user traffic, connections, activity of all kind,

Gave the DBAs plenty of confidence in mind.

When all of a sudden there arose such a clatter,

One DBA sprung from their chair to see what was the matter,

To SSMS they flew like a flash,

To find what had caused the poor DB to crash.

The gath’ring of multiple changes to make,

Had led to a rather ginormous mistake,

When what to their wond’ring eyes should appear through the smoke,

But several Stored Procs, which appeared to have broke,

Dependencies thrown like caution to wind,

A deadline appeared, and none of them grinned,

Deadlocks and latches too were plaguing this night,

It seemed SQL Server was up for a fight.

They worked and they worked, all through the night,

Weary and exhausted, no one knew of their plight,

‘til ping went the inbox, and again and again,

It seemed also users were feeling the pain.

“That’s it”, said one DBA, who had had quite enough,

“I gave up cookies and warm milk, to have it THIS rough!?”

So, with a face quite contorted by strain,

They started to roll-back, but that was also pain.

Trying to find who had changed what, when and why,

Had them verging on madness, and shouting out “why!?!”

But then, in a flash of red and green light,

A man in red coat had appeared from the night.

“Ho Ho Ho” he bellowed, stomach jiggling along too,

“It seems at this point there’s just one thing to do!”

So with a flick of his wrist and a jingle of bells,

Santa highlighted the errors and all the code smells.

“You see poor DBAs, you needn’t be pained!”

“You just need to be agile, there’s much to be gained”

“Big Bang deployments are dangers you see”

“Like leaving for too long, the lights on your tree!”

And like that, as if all’d been a dream,

The DBAs awoke away from their screen,

Twas Christmas once more and now they knew why,

In the new year perhaps, we should give DevOps a try. 

by Chris Unwin, Sales Engineer at Redgate.

You can also listen to Chris on the DBAle podcasts, which has this poem read aloud in episode 7.