Re: pl/sql code maintenance

Sybrand Bakker wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Dec 2002 15:26:54 -0800, DA Morgan
> <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote:
>
> >If there are developers in a test or production database ... the DBA isn't
> >doing the job the DBA was hired to do.
>
> In many situations that's not the situation, because usually
> developers think they are God and a DBA is by design *stupid* or he
> wouldn't have become a DBA.
> My firm has been dealing several times with button-trained monkeys
> coming directly from school, employed by some very large consultancy
> firms (which will always get away with the mess they are selling
> because they can afford to hire the best lawyers), without any
> specific Oracle experience, telling our DBA's what to do, and no DBA
> was allowed to do *anything* without *explicit written permission* of
> the consultancy firm. The term RFC (Request For Change) probably does
> ring a bell, or are you really living in a paradisian ivory tower at
> the University of Washington?
> With *anything* I include *all* activities which are usually the
> exclusive domain of the DBA. Only if the monkeys screw up (which they
> do very often) it is the privilege of my firm to restore backups
> (because no trained monkey would even deign himself to clean the mess
> that he caused)
>
> Regards
>
> Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA
>
> To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address

Of course at the university, as an instructor, I can make my own rules. But 90% of what I do is consulting where I have been in firms such as Boeing, AT&T Wireless, a bank, etc. And in those environments I can assure you no one other than a designated DBA, a member of the DBA team, gets access except read only. And even read only access is rare.

The people the consultancies send in are definitely a problem. But from my experience even they are refused access to production except in an advisory capacity. They advise ... we tested before implementation. And from my experience with them ... and I'm about to paint a very broad brush here ... you are correct that many/most haven't a clue what they are doing. But worse than that ... some of them do ... and I have observed one top consultancy (part of a Big 5 accounting firm that shall remain nameless but whose name starts with the lettes KPMG) intentionally mistune an Oracle Financials project so that they could come back latter, charge more money, and tune it. This wasn't incompetence ... it was intentional.

The moral of the story is that they aren't all untrained monkeys. Some of them know exactly what they are doing. And they may be the most dangerous of all.

Dan Morgan Received on Fri Dec 20 2002 - 19:35:50 CST