Re: developer privs in development (old thread inaccessible)

On Sat, 06 Dec 2003, damorgan_at_x.washington.edu wrote:

> You'll have to excuse me but I got stuck at "Each developer has
> his own local instance."
>
> Someone's got money to burn and is probably in gross violation
> of their license with Oracle Corp.
>
> I've never seen a development project assembled this way
> ... ever.

As far as we understand the licensing, we pay for production instances. As long as we are developing for an application which will be deployed to a purchased Oracle instance, I understood this to be fine. We deploy to a Solaris based Oracle instance, but each developer has a local instance of Oracle on windows. If this is a licensing issue, I'd like to know. Our DBA crew never got up in arms based on licensing issues and they are in charge of our relationship with Oracle. They didn't like it because of the hassle of maintenance. At one point, I had 13 java developers and 5 database developers, each with their own instance. The number of instances never was a hassle, at all. They truly didn't quite care where their database was. What this did allow was for them to work completely offline and autonomously. They had weblogic and Oracle installed local and could work from thier living rooms.

And please reread were I explain how this actually came about. I've never overseen or worked in any place where each developer had her own instance, but damn, it has worked out far better than I could have imagined. I was reluctant to go that route, but I was more reluctant to use the development environment under the complete control of the DBA team. I didn't have time to waste fighting their insane guidelines. So, I instead drafted up and maintained very specific instructions to follow for creation of a local instance as well as helped them through it anyways.

You want to know something? The first week I was there, their head guy sent me their database guidelines with a very stern "You will learn our guidelines". I was reading them and just couldn't believe that anyone had written such bunk, then about 3/4 of the way through, I saw, "if you have any questions, please see the Oracle 7.3 manuals". We were on 9i for Christs sake. But, these DBA guys actually sent this out as their "guidelines". I wasn't even going to try to argue with them.

-- 
Galen Boyer