When the ancient Greeks went to war, their campaigns were brief. The armies operated in the summer, because they needed to be home again in time for the harvest and gathering of grapes and olives. One battle always settled the business.4 A war was specifically designed to be of limited scope and be done with quickly. At that time, governments couldn't run a deficit or borrow money to finance a long, drawn-out campaign. If wartime spilled into harvest, both sides could starve! Everyone knew this, and their tactics were based on doing only what was absolutely necessary.

Just like the ancient Greeks, DBAs should use performance firefighting techniques only when necessary. You don't need to go through deep firefighting performance analysis everyday. If you try to do this, you will probably quit, change groups, or become a manager.5 Take time to celebrate and time to rest. Then your performance firefighting career will be long and glorious!

I first wrote about my 3-circle analysis method back in 1994 on a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. I actually remember writing the paper, entitled "Total Performance Management,"6 in which I called it the holistic problem isolation method. It seemed so natural to the way I approached firefighting that, at the time, I didn't grasp its simple power. Over the years, many of my students have written me about how this one method revolutionized their performance analysis. Strangely, of all my work, this is the very least technical, but perhaps that's the genius of the method.