Fail Environments
Friends of mine have recently starting using the term “fail environment”, as in “you created a…”. It hasn’t even hit Urban Dictionary yet so I think they can safely claim it, but it’s a brilliant expression. Roughly, it means
Creating circumstances, typically by omission of information, through which another person is more likely to fail.
I’m perhaps overly dramatising since I was first introduced to it when I said “Meet me at Cafe X” when there were in fact two of them; none the less, I believe it deserves to be in common usage.
Unfortunately, I was witness to a much more serious example only yesterday. I’ve been doing some work with Microsoft’s SQL Server, working on a local copy of a database (importing data, writing procedures, and so on). It came time to reconcile some changes, and to be cautious we decided to do it manually, using the backup-and-restore feature to copy my database to the destination server.
The Management Studio has a nice interface to backing up a database, pretty much as you’d expect a GUI environment to provide: right-click, select “backup” and a save location, and you have a single portable file.
Restoring from this file is a little less intuitive, but the 2012 update made it much, much worse.
By default, when you restore a file it will restore the entire database, to a database of the same name (granted, probably the main use-case). In our case though we were going to restore to a temporary database on a different server, and manually copy selected changes across to the original that way.
The process is basically to create a new database, right-click and select “restore”… and now the fail environment emerges. You have to switch to a different tab to find your backup file, and when you select it the destination database silently changes, on the first hidden tab, to the one with the same name as the original database, NOT the temporary one you just selected. My colleague doing this is very competent and experienced and actually knew this complication, but while we were checking something else he forgot…1 and overwrote the last three days of his work with mine.
I call that a fail environment.
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In part there’s a few other complications to performing this procedure; you have to manually edit some file names as well for example. ↩︎