Iceberg, Dead Ahead!

Lessons For Technologists From Real World Disasters

I first delivered this presentation at the SQL Rally in Orlando on 5/12/11. You can see the slide deck here:

MikeWalsh_IcebergDeadAhead_SQLRally

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing some blog posts about some of the real world disasters and our lessons from them. In the meantime, some links that talk about this topic and share more info on the disasters:

Related Blog Posts Here At StraightPathSQL

• Plan To Fail Or Don’t Expect To Succeed – Let me share a secret with you – you are going to fail (probably more than once). It’s what you do with them that predict your overall success.  This first part talks about planning for failure and accounting for that possibility.
• Plan To Fail Part Two – In this second part of the above post, I talk about how to use Paranoia as a teaching tool for your organization.
• Harnessing paranoia as a DBA – I think “paranoia” can be a healthy trait in a DBA, what about you?
  
• Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms – Lessons on preparation from Pilots, Chefs and Emergency Room Staff
• Empirical Evidence – A pet peeve of mine, not understanding or trying a solution out first before implementing
• Troubleshooting Methodology – Get one, here’s an approach

The Accidents

In case you want to research more about some of the incidents we discussed, the below links take you to additional information and reports on the incidents discussed in the talk that we drew lessons from. In the coming weeks, I may dissect these a bit further into their own post and series on decision making, attitudes, actions and disaster avoidance in the real world. For now you can see official analysis yourself, if you want.

• Tenerife Airport Disaster
• Avianca Flight 52 – PDF Of Accident Report | Wikipedia Page About Disaster
• United Airlines Flight 173
• Air Canada 621 – PDF Of Accident Report | Wikipedia Page About Disaster
• Payne Stewart’s Flight – PDF Of Accident Report | Wikipedia Page About Disaster
• Us Air Flight 1549 (Landing on the Hudson)

Feel free to leave any comments to discuss what lessons you draw from these disasters.

P.S. – Yeah… I know, we didn’t talk about anything nautical at all. I still like the title. Maybe someday I’ll change to “We’re Gonna Be On The Hudson”