Ed Wagner (8/29/2015)
xsevensinzx (8/29/2015)
Ed Wagner (8/28/2015)
Scott, I agree with you that the point is to run a business. You raise a good point about perspective. It may be that cutting off all access could be bad for business, but so could having everyone with a computer having the ability to run whatever queries they want against the production database. It might impact performance...just a bit anyway.Going back to a previous post, the DBA and management needs to have a serious conversation, focused on the needs and wants of the employees.
As for me, I'd vote no.
I struggle with this a great deal on my end because the data is primarily used for reporting only. While it's good to restrict, the end users who pay your salary may defy everything holy and still insist due to lack of understanding the reproductions of their actions.
I get around this now by simply providing reporting data marts for the business case. The only issue is the bottleneck of creating a the data mart, but at least it's separate, read only and totally secure for only the end users for that specific business case.
Well, it's good that you're talking about a separate database for reporting. If they're isolated from impacting the performance of the production system, then they won't take anything down. I hope (for your sake) that they know how to write queries to produce accurate results.
The assumption that users don't know how to access the data or query the data highly depends on the organization. My users actually find it insulting when DBA's assume they don't know anything about the data or the services used to manage/serve that data for them on a daily basis.
This is primarily because my users are heavy into analytics. They read and write in various scripting languages and code. While they are not experts in the database, specifically SQL Server, they have been educated enough by myself to know how to query the database good enough.
So, playing the card that you don't know any better and we must protect you from yourself for everyone's good does not fly in some organizations. Especially being what we do is not exactly rocket science.