Re: EM access to developers

On 01/30/2015 09:37 PM, kellyn.potvin_at_ymail.com wrote:
>
>
> I saw too many IT departments remove DBA roles from their staff
> because DBAs were viewed as roadblocks to project success.

So have I. The IT departments that have done so have never succeeded, in the long run.

> Attend a conference like ODTUG's KSCOPE and you'll hear this story so
> often from the developers that it will make you realize that the "us
> vs. them" scenario is making DBAs a liability instead of an asset.

DBA is the guardian of the production database, the person ultimately responsible for its performance and availability. If the developer wants to put a huge full table scan in an OLTP application and use PQ to resolve it quickly, it's the DBA job to prevent that from happening, because such query would consume resources needed for other programs. I used to work as a production DBA in a companies with several thousands of online users, using web applications. If DBA doesn't exercise a tight control over the database, performance will ultimately become sluggish for everybody. And that is a resume generating event. It's my job to prevent that from happening.

> Steven Feuerstein often asks in his sessions, "of the DBAs in here,
> how many grant access to performance views in Enterprise Manager?" I'm
> often the only one who raises their hand and the common excuse is, "If
> we grant them access, then they'll be able to see things" Really.

Of course they will be able to see things, but would they be able to interpret them correctly? Performance tuning requires certain training and certain mindset. Developers are rarely trained for performance tuning. From my experience, they don't show too much interest in the performance analysis. You would be surprised to learn how many developers still think in terms of buffer cache hit ratios.

>
> Well, here's the way I see it. No DBA has any excuse for complaining
> about the quality of code released in production if they aren't
> willing to provide developers and testing the same access to view
> performance data in tools such as Enterprise Manager as they have.

Why is that? What would you achieve by giving an access to trace files to the person who doesn't know how to analyze them? What would you achieve by giving access to all those performance monitors to the people who are not sure how to interpret them? Instead of a diagnosis we would get a debate about the meaning of the monitoring data.

> With more and more companies moving towards Agile, more companies
> using scrum masters/scrum collaboration, it is essential for everyone
> to understand the challenges they are up against and truly work as a team.

Agile is frequently used incorrectly and becomes the source of the problem. The financial appeal of Agile is cutting the costs of QA. The end result is frequently spewing large quantities of code, without DBA being able to influence it. About 3 years ago, I resigned my DBA position at a company which was doing Agile, precisely because of that. There was an application code in the SYS schema. I am not a big fan of Agile.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
http://mgogala.freehostia.com

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