The most stressful deployments fail silently…
“…Everything seems fine, until, days later, a client reports a problem, an irate manager appears behind you demanding answers, and there’s no quick fix.”
Thomas Rushton, Principal Data Platform Engineer at Coeo
In a long career as a DBA, Thomas Rushton has seen how deployment-related stress can build, especially when teams are under pressure to deliver fast and fix faster. The most disruptive problems don’t always show their hand right away. A database deployment appears to succeed, only for issues to surface hours or days later.
By then, production has moved on, rollbacks are tricky, and the pressure ramps up as clients and managers demand a fix
For frontline support staff, these incidents often land on top of heavy workloads, causing late nights, difficult hand-offs across time zones, and extra stress on already stretched teams.
The underlying causes vary, but Thomas often traces them back to excessive access to production environments and uncontrolled changes, leading to schema drift and wild inconsistencies between environments. He also points to deployment scripts that lack basic checks and safeguards, and to the recurring sins of SELECT * in production code. Thomas emphasizes how these problems aren’t always caught by automated checks. When things do go wrong, the fix requires patient investigation of the root cause and then prevention. His advice?
Never skip the retrospective. Every failed deployment holds a lesson, but if you don’t take time to learn it, the stress just repeats. Understand the ‘why,’ improve the process, and over time the pressure will ease.
So how does Thomas decompress outside of work? Through music, playing double bass with several orchestras across Yorkshire. “It’s a complete mental shift“, he explains, a chance to swap the noise of daily work for the rhythm of something collaborative and creative. “Music teaches you to lead, to follow, to listen, to communicate, all at the same time!”
Teamwork, timing, and trust seem to matter in musical performance just as much as in database deployments!
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