In the Kalevala the God of the Forest is called Tapio. The Kalevala, also known as the land of heroes, is the national epic of Finland and is not only an extremely important work to the Finns but also an important contribution to world literature. For example, the meter in Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha was modeled after the Kalevala. Besides also being a common man's name in Finland, Tapio is also the name of one of my cats.

In the Finnish language you can denote the place of something by adding the ending -la. About 20 miles from Helsinki in the middle of nowhere (there's a lot of that in Finland) I've driven past a sign that reads Oravala which points to a small road. Once I was curious and tried to see where it led. I didn't find anything at all there, just a few houses. Orava in Finnish means squirrel and Oravala means where the squirrel lives.

Which brings me to Tapiola (a place name from the Kalevala) which means the place where Tapio the Forest God lives. Tapiola is the name of a wonderful and quite famous musical tone poem (op. 112) by Jean Sibelius and one of the last pieces of music that he wrote before he died. Tapiola is also the name of a large banking and insurance company here in Finland and the place where I am spending a lot of time these days.

We had a very good planning meeting on Wednesday. Besides talking about the SAS Finland Forum presentation that I will be giving about our project (plus a lot of planning things) we discussed the need for creating some tools to monitor the system for any potential problems like disk space filling up. After this we wanted to look at how some system things were defined using the SAS Management Console (SMC). I started the SMC, clicked a few times and then started getting errors.

Oh no. After a bit of checking we saw disk full errors. Double oh no. That's not a good thing to have happen that affects two metadata servers, one used by developers and the other used for production.

So we quickly corrected the situation and everything seemed ok, until I got home and received an email that one of the production repositories was corrupted. Triple oh no.

I arrived there as quickly as I could the next morning and we first moved things around so that we would be safe. The last resort was to restore from a backup since, of course, the problem happened in the afternoon just before everyone was leaving from work. And the backup happened that morning just after midnight. We wanted to try some other things first. The problem appeared to be related only to one dataset in their repository so the first thing we tried was some SAS Proc Datasets Repair magic. It worked!

We re-registered the repository and their developer checked everything out and said it was fine now. We all breathed a sigh of relief and someone made a joke that we should turn off our phones and leave the building before anything else went wrong. Nothing did though.

So it seems that the Forest God was smiling on us that day which was a good thing.