Re: Oracle Administration...?

In article <DAVIDM.93Apr29205921_at_prometheus.consilium.com> davidm_at_consilium.com (David S. Masterson) writes:
>My Oracle experience is, admittedly, definitely out-of-date and many things
>have changed. I find, though, that I'm even having trouble understanding how
>to do the first operation that I need to attempt, that is, creating a
>database. It seems from the documentation that this operation is reserved to
>a very limited set of people -- namely the DBAs. While this is logical in a
>production environment, I'm not quite sure what to make of this for a DB
>application development environment. Could any Oracle developers answer the
>following questions:
>
>1. Do you allow your developers to create databases or reserve this capability
>to a select group (the DBAs)?

This is reserved for "DBA"s. Actually anyone that wants to create a database has to have approvla of the "data architect". We have found that the designers (at least those here) have little concept of good relational design practices.

>2. How do you handle test databases? Do developers make a copy of the master
>database to populate for testing purposes?

The developers are given a copy of the production database (on a separate machine) for test purposes.

>3. Do you allow developers to alter databases so that they may change metadata
>and test ideas for new applications? Or is this reserved to DBAs?

This is a reserved "privilege". See number 1 above. Generally what happens is that the developer talks to the architect and they come to a compromise that satisfies both. So far this has worked OK. This depends on the developer haveing a good comprhension of the business environment (which is often a problem ;-).

>4. How do you change control the database design? On a different database
>system, we've maintained SQL scripts for building the database -- does this
>make sense for Oracle?

The production systems here have a set of scripts that could (theoretically) rebuild the data base from scratch. This was done because we had some "hardware" problems that required multiple rebuilds and it seemed like a good idea after that.

BTW - what ever works for you is right. What I have described is not necessarily

      acceptable in other places.

>Thanks for your help...
>
>--
>====================================================================
>David Masterson Consilium, Inc.
>(415) 691-6311 640 Clyde Ct.
>davidm_at_consilium.com Mtn. View, CA 94043
>====================================================================
>"Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop
> some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees."
>-- Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989

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