As many companies judge a DBA’s worth on the uptime of a database, nothing tests a DBA’s mettle like database service outages where the cause is indeterminate at the time of the outage.  The secondary challenge is that once the database is brought back up, the DBA must then take the necessary steps to analyze the data and figure out what caused the outage, hopefully resolving or reporting to ensure outages to not re-occur.  The DBA’s goal should not just be to resolve the issue, but to provide a high level, clearly documented report of what occurred and what steps…