Changing DBA Roles
Continuing with the series on the changing roles of a DBA I wanted to talk today about production Access Control. I mentioned that working on a fast paced Agile team the last 7 years resulted in a number of process changes. One change that has occurred, not due to an Agile process per se, but due to separation of responsibilities from a security perspective, is restricted, or virtually no access in production databases.
The intention for this policy is that any individual familiar with production code should not have access to production resources. Instead, production resources are monitored and managed by operations personnel with limited understanding of database code or processes.
This introduces interesting challenges to a DBA. They are responsible for bugs and performance of a production system without having access. The DBA must learn to work through others.
This doesn’t mean that a DBA never gets access to the production system…that can always be achieved with a production operator working side by side with a DBA. But, that isn’t always possible or efficient. Instead the DBA will often script tools, or even use PowerShell, to generate necessary output when monitoring things such as CPU utilization, disk buffer performance, or memory usage.
Deployment of database changes is also something performed by others. Database change scripts are essential to complete this task. By working from database scripts, changes to schema, code, or data may be tested completely in a Development, and QA environment prior to being pushed out into a production environment. This results in a production operator being able to deploy complex changes assuring they run successfully and that the database code is synchronized with the application code.
These processes may be automated considerably so that much of the database change scripting can be performed by any developer on your team. Frequently a DBA will modify some of the more sophisticated change scripts.
Working through others, especially production operators, results in more time for a DBA to commit to other productive tasks, and to assure solid database releases, because they are tested fully long before a production release is performed.
Do you have comments on the changing role of the DBA? Why not share them with us by writing to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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