Technical Support

I have had a busy week at the office. There was a problem with our data warehouse and it was up to me to fix it. I knew I must have changed something but couldn't figure out what I did. So I called technical support.

Not all technical support departments are created equal. When I worked in Oracle's technical support many years ago, I got a feel for just how tough that job could be. You have to know the product intimately and for a product like our data warehouse, that can be a daunting task.

Amazingly, I got a live technical support representative on the phone and he stayed on the line until the problem was solved. His first questions was the same one I had been asking myself: What changed? I couldn't think of anything I had done that would cause the problem we were having. The rep set up a WebEx session so he could see what I was describing and we then started running through one or two exercises. It didn't take me long to remember that I had added something to the database earlier in the previous week and it took 5 days for that change to manifest itself. 30 seconds later the problem was corrected and the data warehouse was fixed.

The technical support rep never solved my issue. I was the one that discovered my mistake and was glad to figure it out as quickly as I did. However It sure was nice having someone else on the other end of the phone with which to discuss my problem. I'm sure it would have taken a lot longer to figure out if I was on my own.