First off, welcome back class! So this week we鈥檙e 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鈥檚 not really evil but it is not one of the more glamorous parts of the job, yet it is . 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鈥檙e going to be expected to be the one to fix it.
鈥淏ut I鈥檓 working on this really important production issue, I can鈥檛 stop everything just to troubleshoot a system I put into production 3 years ago and can鈥檛 remember half the things I put into it!鈥� 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鈥檚 go over some of the different aspects of documentation within a system and why they are important.