Re: PeopleSoft SQR Development Question -Reply

[Wayne Ivory <wivory@WSL.COM.AU>]

Jim,

Congratulations on one of the most well-written emails I've ever seen.  The fact that I happen to agree with you is by-the-by - it was well set out, comprehensive, yet easy to read.

I work for a mining company in Western Australia.  We have 400 employees and an IS department of 14 people.  We are in the process of implementing PeopleSoft HRMS and have 2 dedicated programmers and a project manager, and share the single DBA with the rest of the department.  We programmers have the sysadm password for our 6 environments (including production) and do all the things your programmers do (ie sqls, drop, alter).  Our DBA is very competent, but extremely busy, and like yours doesn't have an intimate understanding of PeopleSoft.

Yes, mistakes can happen in production, but that's why God invented backups, and I think it actually strengthens your character.  In fact I've devised a maxim I'll call Wayne's Law for want of a better name (note: contains obscentity - skip next paragraph if you think you'll be offended):

"Good programmers fuck up really badly once!"

Whether it be "rm *" or "drop" or any one of the other potentially catastrophic commands at our disposal, my experience has been that once this happens to someone it rattles them to the point that they sort of develop a sixth sense about these things.  I can think of about 10 people (including myself) that fall into this category.

Of course Jim's and my approach won't suit every site, but Mike (the original poster) be assured it is a worthwhile consideration.  If you have competent professional people working on your project then you can afford to trust them with this sort of responsibility.

Wayne Ivory
Information Services
Westralian Sands Limited


>>> Jim Hardesty <jhardest@LMBERRY.COM> 5/10/98 9:27:48 pm >>>
Mike,

I'm sure you will get many responses advocating strong control of the databases.
And there are many good reasons to have strong control.

But let me give another side.

<snip>

______________________________________________________________________________
Mike Fulce                    __   Oracle Database Administrator I
OTR-Admin. Resources      ___/ /__ University of Southern Mississippi
m.fulce@usm.edu          /__  ___/ Voice:(601) 266-6102 Fax:(601) 266-6881
207 Forrest County Hall    / /     Box 5171, Hattiesburg, MS 39406
                          / /      http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~rmfulce 
                          ^^