Tyberious Funk (2/10/2013)
<snipped>We have no Dev/Test environment, just Prod. Development and testing work gets done directly in the production environment, and changes are frequently made on the fly. This is on the grounds that maintaining an additional environment would be too resource intensive. Understandably, our Production environment is a massive mess and it has become extremely difficult to distinguish work-in-progress from completed tasks.
Personally I think I would prefer a separate Development and Production environment (both with ETL and database) rather than a single Production environment.
OK, as I read your predecessor's opinion, having the separate ETL server is important to take load off a production server that is already all mucked up with development and testing work? Yikes!
If the production server can handle the overnight ETL processes without hindering production processes and you can only afford two servers, I would absolutely push for separate development and production environments. The additional effort to manage a development environment (that in almost all respects will be configured exactly the same as the production environment, permissions being the most obvious exception I can think of) should be manageable, even with a small team. You say that the data warehouse is important but not business-critical, but I expect that the users of that data warehouse would be calling for your head if it is unavailable for two or three days while your team rebuilds it (you mentioned that your DBA resources are limited) because someone ran some ill-conceived, un-reviewed, and untested code that brought it crashing down in flames.
Jason Wolfkill