First off, welcome back class! So this week we’re talking about writing. As a DBA or a developer you are going to be asked at some point to perform a necessary evil called documentation. Why is this evil? Well, it’s not really evil but it is not one of the more glamorous parts of the job, yet it is one of the most essential. Good documentation is everything! Without documentation you can spend all the time in the world developing the greatest system on earth, utilizing some of the most complex and beautiful code ever written but when something eventually (and it will) break, you’re going to be expected to be the one to fix it.
“But I’m working on this really important production issue, I can’t stop everything just to troubleshoot a system I put into production 3 years ago and can’t remember half the things I put into it!” Ah, but if you had only documented it someone else could be supporting the system and you could be blissfully working on the here and now. When we talk about documentation, however, that word means different things to different people. Let’s go over some of the different aspects of documentation within a system and why they are important.