Access to the database

There is a kind of discussion ongoing who should have access to a database, and under what circumstances.
I have never done either of Jeffs or Chets job, so I cannot write anything reasonable about these. But I am sometimes a kind of DBA. This makes me my best source of knowledge about this job, and the attitude I created during the years.

I developed a certain expectation about the differences between an operation guy and others, who are not responsible for productive systems. I even have my private opinion about a sales related job, but that's not my topic today.

From my point of view it's all about control.

For an operational focused person, my work is about control. If there is uncontrolled behaviour somewhere, this will lead to an incident. And that will causes a call. As I like to sleep at least 8 hours per day, that means one out of 3 calls will disturb this sleep (on average).

Of course every incident potentially costs my company money. Or reputation. This will come down to me again. Writing reports. Doing management presentations. Nonproductive paperwork.

After all this additional work, I will do my best to avoid this situation. Analyzing what went out of bounds, led to this uncontrolled behaviour. At the end I even try to change the environment so this will not happen again.

It's all about control. Freak!

So who should get access to my systems? Only those whose I can control. Or at least I can trust?

It's hard to decide whom to trust. At least to which specific level.

Jeffs driving license seems to be a try to formalise this need. But similar to a driving license, it only shows you have the allowance to drive. It rarely tells anything about the skills.

Talking about skills brings one more dimension here: People living in an ecosystem where every action is controlled by a QualityAssurance team are used to go to the limits and beyond. That's great, it's what is expected from them. Otherwise they would do their job bad.

It's just not what I want in a productive environment. There boundaries are, to never be reached.

I put a more pragmatic approach: If someone takes responsibility for the work, it's fine for me. As an example: if the person who added a big bug during a small hotfix at 5pm is called at 2am the next morning to fix this bug, I'm fine.

And just one more dimension: I favour to grant access to people who know what they can break with this: Just ask me for any access to v$ views in my DB; you will get it, just after you show and explain me how you can halt the application if you abuse it.

Need a short summary?

I like to control access to my database, so I limit it to people who I trust.

To gain it, show me your responsibility and knowledge.