December 9, 2014 at 8:20 am
Hello, I was looking for suggestions from the tenured DBA's here as I am a very new junior DBA.
I work with one developer who has a few years experience. She wants admin rights to our SQL Server 2014 BI edition that we run.
Do most developers have sys admin rights?
Would you give your developer this right? If not, why may I ask?
Thank you for any responses.
December 9, 2014 at 8:27 am
If it's a live server, definitely not. Sysadmin should only be given to DBAs. We don't live in an ideal world, so sometimes we have to make exceptions - but it's up to her to make that case if she thinks she needs it. If it's a development server then yes, I'm all for giving developers full access and allowing them to manage the server themselves.
John
December 9, 2014 at 8:30 am
butcherking13 (12/9/2014)
Hello, I was looking for suggestions from the tenured DBA's here as I am a very new junior DBA.I work with one developer who has a few years experience. She wants admin rights to our SQL Server 2014 BI edition that we run.
Do most developers have sys admin rights?
Would you give your developer this right? If not, why may I ask?
Thank you for any responses.
Devs do NOT generally have sys admin rights anywhere, though on a development server is perhaps forgiveable.
Why not? Because they are developers, not DBAs or release managers. Developers often cannot resist the temptation to tweak things, even in production environments.
Give them read access, at most, to production servers, unless their role extends beyond development.
If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.
December 9, 2014 at 8:37 am
What kind of developer are we talking about? Will she actually be doing database development or does she just need access to view data and code and what not?
There's a huge temptation for say a web developer to go in and make a server setting change or modify tables or stored procedures in crazy ways to make whatever they're trying to do work and then noone finds out until it either blows up in production or their months of work get invalidated when they ask for a change to be migrated to production and you find out they're changes just won't work....
December 9, 2014 at 8:46 am
In the previous company i worked for we had a team of database developers and a team of software developers, both groups were assigned to a sysadmin role... Once in a while software developers did mess up something big time on the production, their speciality was dropping objects :hehe: but no one was botherd to change the team structure, so my advice would be not to go that way, because once you go that way there is no going back (or it won't be that easy).
December 9, 2014 at 8:56 am
She is currently developing stored procedures to automate several reports. Not sure what they have planned for her down the road.
She has asked for sys admin rights because we are having issues with the packages she is creating for SSIS. They are not working and I am having a hard time figuring out why. I don't want to give her the rights because I am afraid of what she might attempt to do.
Thanks for the reply!
December 9, 2014 at 9:06 am
butcherking13 (12/9/2014)
She is currently developing stored procedures to automate several reports. Not sure what they have planned for her down the road.She has asked for sys admin rights because we are having issues with the packages she is creating for SSIS. They are not working and I am having a hard time figuring out why. I don't want to give her the rights because I am afraid of what she might attempt to do.
Thanks for the reply!
Do you have a development/QA environment? Are they working there? If yes, I would say that she should sit with you and you work out together why it works in one place and not the other. But do not give her the rights,
If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.
December 9, 2014 at 9:06 am
butcherking13 (12/9/2014)
...developing stored procedures to automate several reports...
Don't think there is any need to give someone sysadmin just to automate few reports in SSIS.
Go with what Phil is saying.
December 9, 2014 at 9:13 am
It is just us two as this is a very new project and no one else here has a clue about Database. The people here think Excel is a database....
The developer has more experience than me and is doing great, but we are just stuck on a few things so she is asking for the rights.
I prefer to sit with her and work on it.
I am not in favor of giving her rights and posted this question to see if anyone would make me think twice about it.
Thanks for your suggestion!
December 9, 2014 at 9:13 am
I am. Thank you for your responding!
December 9, 2014 at 9:28 am
Just so you know, if it's a smaller company with only a few Dev's you will generally see that Dev's have a lot of access as there's no real QA process. When companies get larger, this changes.
December 10, 2014 at 4:04 am
Small company or not, I strongly recommend putting process for getting stuff out to production into place and following it religiously. The last thing you want are for changes to get made to your production server that don't exist in your dev or test environments. That will lead to even more issues. Even if you give this person access to prod (something I'm against generally), you have to make sure you have that process and that everyone agrees to follow it.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
December 10, 2014 at 6:35 am
Grant Fritchey (12/10/2014)
Small company or not, I strongly recommend putting process for getting stuff out to production into place and following it religiously. The last thing you want are for changes to get made to your production server that don't exist in your dev or test environments. That will lead to even more issues. Even if you give this person access to prod (something I'm against generally), you have to make sure you have that process and that everyone agrees to follow it.
+1. Then again, a lack of quality control is one thing that prevents small companies from becoming big companies.
December 10, 2014 at 8:11 am
About the only time it would be reasonable for a developer to have sysadmin is when they're the only one doing both jobs - like yours truly.
It really gets fun when I have dba-vs-developer arguments with myself. I usually win. 😀
____________
Just my $0.02 from over here in the cheap seats of the peanut gallery - please adjust for inflation and/or your local currency.
December 10, 2014 at 9:45 am
Grant Fritchey (12/10/2014)
Small company or not, I strongly recommend putting process for getting stuff out to production into place and following it religiously. The last thing you want are for changes to get made to your production server that don't exist in your dev or test environments. That will lead to even more issues. Even if you give this person access to prod (something I'm against generally), you have to make sure you have that process and that everyone agrees to follow it.
I totally agree but you can expect a lot of resistance. I'm in the middle of this right now.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply