Re: DBA Responsibilities... who owns the database?

From: Phil Herring <revdoc_at_uow.edu.au>
Date: 4 Jun 1998 00:56:03 GMT
Message-ID: <6l4rb3$bll$1@wyrm.its.uow.edu.au>

In article <3574B0EB.706D8E1E_at_mitec.net> Mike Oswald, moswald_at_mitec.net writes:
>So what is the general feeling out there? Your comments would be
>appreciated!

What most people refer to as a "development instance" is actually a production instance... to the developers. So you have to include the associated costs of downtime in the event of a screwup. Does the company want the developers sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for a database restore?

Another issue is the impact that one instance has on other instances. Having complete control over an instance may mean, for example, being able to cripple the CPU, and any other (production) instances on it. In some environments, even increasing disk usage by adding data files might result in service outages on other databases. (It's not for nothing that most sites prefer to do their development on a separate system.)

In an ideal world, the solution would be to simply ensure that the developers have adequate support from the DBA. In the real world, though, you might have to compromise, and give them access to some DBA priviledges. For example, I can see how creating public synonyms would be desirable. But I'd keep them out of SYS and SYSTEM, and definitely out of init.ora and space management. That stuff belongs to the DBA.

Received on Wed Jun 03 1998 - 19:56:03 CDT