Patience

Patience. Patience is a virtue that I’ve been struggling with this week. I’ve been working with a person who adamantly believes that the SQL Server backup process locks tables in the database and will therefore cause his application to fail. I explained that this simply isn’t the case. I quoted numerous reputable sources. I offered examples from his own application. I ran a backup concurrent to his application, successfully. I walked through every line of the code, on the off chance it was doing something wacky. It isn’t. I ran tests specifically designed to cause the blocking he insists will happen. No blocking. No failures.

And yet, none of this mattered. He believes what he believes.

Why should I care?

Paul Randal wrote about ignorance yesterday. As he pointed out, we’re all ignorant. There are vast quantities of things I am ignorant about. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, ignorance is one thing, willful ignorance in the face of all evidence to the contrary is something else. This guy (the first guy, not Paul) is not a SQL Server expert, and I don’t expect him to be. But what I do expect from a professional is the capacity to acknowledge that there are others who might know more than you about some things. And you might do well to hear what they have to say.

I left the conversation hanging. As I said, my patience was wearing thin, and I certainly didn’t want the exchange to devolve into something I’d regret later. But, I would love to hear from some of you out there on this. Even if it’s to tell me I’m being a judgemental ass.

Really, how do you deal with situations like this?