Metaflex

There is a small development office comprised of eight developers out there. They crank out code to support the financial decision makers at the company they are contracted to and over the years their database schemas have grown. Bottom line was they were spending more and more of their time maintaining the databases and less on providing services for their clients.

Enter the Database Administrator

They felt like they needed someone to provide support when it came to maintaining the databases. This person would help when they needed to produce a complex query and would guide them to better design choices. Someone who would ensure backups ran and would document the databases. Someone who would support the developers by ensuring the database would continue working at its peak by monitoring indexes, statistics, and files.

What they got was an academic theorist who is formalizing everything possible into a best practice nightmare. They got an academic theorist who doesn’t know how to maintain the database, but does know what other people have written about database design and techniques. What the developers are getting are rules to follow – the Database Administrator is supervising their projects more than administering the database.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like standards and I agree that it is important to put these policies into effect. It just would have been nice for the developers to be able to spend more time writing software. Instead they still end up doing all the work a bona fide database administrator should be doing and they lose a little morale every time they have to do the Database Administrator’s job.

The developers in that team know that they can only rely upon themselves in the event of a critical database failure and not the Database Administrator.