• Good description Journeyman. I am a production dba and your summary is very well to the point. I must add that of performance monitoring our job is to find the queries that's disruptive to normal service and hand it back to vendor/developer.

    The reason why we don't do anything is in our shop "all about integrity". The applications owner must know we don't touch the structure of their database. We can recommend but never demand. If somehow our recommendations aren't met we'll pursue other alternatives - like moving database to own instance, single server (not cluster) and such. This is to commit our values to other applications owners that we take action to prevail a secure and stable environment.

    This is actually very much appreciated. We have around 3000 applications and 16000 dbs to control.