Protecting Your Systems… from DBAs?
Karen wrote in with a link to this story about a DBA that was caught stealing, then dismissed, of course. On the way out, they decided to take down the database for the company, effectively putting the company out of business. Lovely.
There are a number of things that come from this story.
First, the trust that is put in DBAs just doesn’t need this kind of garbage. We all work very hard to protect systems, use best practices and make sure our systems are well taken-care-of. I like to think that this is a minority-type report – where someone would toss all of that aside and seek vengeance. This goes back to that code of ethics discussion we had a while back. Of course anyone that would walk out tossing a virtual grenade into the data center isn’t going to be paying attention to doing the "right" thing in the first place…
Second, this suggests, strongly, that management should be using a bit of the old "trust, but verify," at least when it comes to critical (recovery, fault tolerance) things that are put into place at a company. But, of course, this means that "management" would have to know better – and isn’t that the point of having a DBA – someone watching out for recoverability? I’m not sure what the answer is in the small-to-medium size company where you don’t necessarily have redundant resources that can team up on architecture and design elements.
In this case, the DBA set up things to be on RAID array drives, calling that the system backup. Right.
I’m at a loss, though, on what you’d recommend to help companies know when something like this is going on. It’s not "management’s" responsibility to know all (if it was, why hire DBAs?), so how do they double-check things, realistically, and without insulting the vast majority of well-meaning DBAs, that are happening on their systems. Heck, how do they even keep up with what they should double-check in the first place?
Any ideas? Drop me a note here.
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