Re: Good call from the CEO.
I've had a few managers who took the blame for the department over the years and several that tried to push the blame further down the tree...
I've tried to become one of the former over the years.
When I was working on a job for a finance department at a customer, we had to recalculate Essbase hypercubes twice a days... Process:
1. Backup bottom row data
2. Delete all data from the hypercube
3. Load bottom row data from backup
4. Recalculate
The delete data and reload was standard OP for Essbase back then. A clean calculation from an empty cube took around an hour, a re-calculation of a full cube took around 8 hours...
I went through the process a couple of times, then the next time through, I somehow got distracted and started at 2... And, oh, no current data to load! I asked the junior dev who had been responsible for the database what we do now? He said, load the previous backup and blame it on the users. I was horrified, so I went to the Finance Director and my stomach was really rebelling, but I told him exactly what had happened, that the database had a transaction log and we would load the previous backup, replay the transaction log and the users should double check the data, once the cube had re-calculated, and that it would take around 2 hours, instead of 1 hour.
I loaded the backup, played the transaction log and recalculated. It turned out it worked and we lost a total of 2 transactions.
My honesty gained me the trust of the finance director and we had a very good working relaitonship after that.