Re: survey - DBA structure in your company ?

I agree that there could be valid reasons for this. Ideally these reasons should be documented somewhere, and maybe reviewed once in a while.
It will also be useful if the geographically and organizationally separate DBAs will talk to each other once in a while, because if one DBA found added value in a specific technique or feature, maybe others will want to know about it.
(I hope I don't sound bitter here, I love my work environment. I just sometimes wish I knew what to expect when I have to maintain a server that is not officially "mine". Similar directory names would be nice as a start).

That said, I do see value in consolidation for consolidation sake, unless the requirements are really different. It seems to require somewhat less time to maintain one reasonably generic script than the aggregated maintenance of 10 scripts each slightly different.

The major example I can give to this is that we are moving from NFS to SAN this year. If we finish consolidating our backup scripts on time, it'll be only one backup procedure we have to figure out how to migrate, and only one place we will have to later fix all the bugs will surely run into on our first attempt to work with that SAN.

But, as Tom Kyte said - Never say always and never say never.

Chen

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