Re: Are Oracle DBAs trivialized?

In message <1113863591.20710_at_yasure>, DA Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> writes
>Jim Smith wrote:
>
>> Any activity which costs money and introduces risk above a certain
>>level needs management approval in every business I've ever worked
>>in. Perhaps you have unlimited budgets?
>
>I agree so lets examine your statements.
>
>RMAN doesn't cost money. If you have it you have already paid for it.
>And one should probably point out that when management approves the
>purchase of a software package, say Oracle 10g, they have approved
>purchasing the entire package ... they didn't say well we'll take it
>all but not interMedia.

The software doesn't cost money, but the people to implement and test does. You may also have to upgrade backup software for RMAN compatibility (on the assumption that if you are not keeping up to date generally, your backup software is also out of date), buy more disks, more tapes, whatever.
>
>What risk? I think you introduce a far higher degree of risk by not
>using RMAN and I think there is a huge amount of documentation that
>supports this that your Oracle SE would be happy to provide to you.
>

The risk in changing. I have done many major operations as a DBA - upgrades, platform migrations, DBMS migrations - but the ones that are most likely to cause sleepless nights are changes to backups. The cost of failure is huge, and there is always the fear that there is something wrong that you won't discover until you have to restore... I have yet to come across a site which has a really satisfactory test backup environment.

>There is a risk in doing something ... that I will grant. But there
>is also a risk in doing nothing. To (excuse me for the word) pretend
>there is no risk involved in doing nothing is methinks a mistake.
>

Agreed, there should always be a cost of doing nothing section. Unfortunately "Well, duh", isn't very persuasive.

>At least that is my opinion and I'm sticking with it. ;-)

-- 
Jim Smith
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