Where I live, we have a lot of wildfires going on right now. I live in Utah in the Western United States; every year we have fire seasons. Firefighters train all the time for fire incidents and how to handle the conditions when fires spring up. They spend time preparing and getting ready for when fires spring up. We hear about major fires all the time and the thousands of acres that burn; it would be so much worse without these amazing people who go and fight those fires and help to keep us safe. They can do this because of the tons of training and practice they do for when fires start. 

As a DBA and database manager, I spent many of my days “fighting fires”. It was not life and death (you would think it was from the calls we were on), but we still had to deal with problems flaring up in the Database and things going wrong. Sometimes the answers were simple and a bad query was running; someone released something that didn’t go the way it was planned; sometimes it was just busy from natural traffic. Whatever the reason, the lesson we learned is that the more events happened, the better we were at handling these things. You could tell the senior people on the team that had been through lots of fires; they knew where to look and what to do. My goal as a Manager was to get more people ready for the fires and for them to be as accomplished as the senior members. 

Whether you are a manager reading this or a DBA. I strongly suggest you start to find ways to practice and prepare for when the fire season does come. Every company is a little different in when the busy time is. I know in my former company the busy time is just about to begin. It’s the start of August, and millions of college students are going to be moving all around the country, and that will cause all the systems to become very busy. If they have not trained or prepared for this time, then they are going to have a very busy fire season.  

Here are some tips to help you prepare for incidents(fires).  

1. 1. Incident Review: Post-mortem on all incidents should not just include what alerts to create. It should include a knowledge base article on how to resolve it in the future. If it happened once, it will happen again.  
   2. Paired firefighting: This is not only important for an extra set of eyes but for people to learn. If you can include a new employee along with a senior employee, even better.  
   3. Training Sessions:  These need to be hands-on, where everyone is typing out and trying commands. Don’t just re-watch videos or recordings of how to do something; you need to actually walk through doing it, and you need to do it frequently. 
   4. Automation:  Making things quick and easy to get back the information you need is critical. Whether you use a Monitoring solution(Redgate Monitor is pretty awesome!) or homemade scripts to manage your system. Make sure it’s easy and quick to use. When people are under intense pressure, they make mistakes, and the best way to solve that is practice with simple things that make it easy to see what’s going on. 
   5. Communication: Practice active communication in your incidents. In an incident call, nothing is worse than just a long pause or silence with no one giving updates. Practice telling people about status, what you are currently doing, and sharing your screen as you work. All of these things will show confidence in what you are doing. That is critical when you are working an incident.  

If you are in one of those non-busy seasons, now is the perfect time to practice and get ready for the busy season. I hope you take a minute to schedule some of these things with your team and spend the time preparing for the next season. If you are currently in a busy season, I hope it goes well for you!

If I left anything out, please add it into the comments. I would love to hear other suggestions and comments anyone has on incidents. 

Finally, a huge THANK YOU to all the amazing people in the firefighting community who keep us safe and risk their lives every day to fight the fires.