It's not just that DBAs have to think of other solutions, but that the entire organization has to want to work to achieve such solutions as well.
As an example, I am one of 2 DBA/programmers at our bank, and every year we go to each department and talk about how they work and how we can help increase their productivity. Well, our commercial sales people requested a database of "soft" customer information -- so they could give a more personable face to the customer and also see potential sales opportunities.
We looked into it, and found that our core database already has the structures in place to record this information -- the information just had to be entered in. So we brought that to the table and got 2 responses:
1. The sales people (who had the information) didn't want to "waste" their time with data entry,
2. The back-end people (who do data entry) didn't want the sales people touching the core at all, and didn't have the extra time to do it themselves.
So while database-wise, this was the lowest-hanging fruit possible (i.e, a system that meets the requirements already up and fully integrated), people-wise, it was poison.
You also have situations where people are afraid of efficiency (i.e, they think the computers will take away their jobs.) While this is true for some basic data-entry-only positions, we take the approach that our job is to program the repetitive/mathematical tasks so humans can get on with the thinking and decision-making.
daniel.thompson (2/12/2009)
I agree that these thought processes are an excellent way of considering our databases, but with experience often these ideas will always be just that. I have often had ideas within our organisation, for example the new user trigger which could create an AD account and scripts etc.Our network guy reminded me of the redundancy and dependability of systems on other systems. If the database server goes offline for any specific period of time (which it rarely does of course!) how would these processes be executed without it? In the end I thought this was a completely useless argument to get involved in. He was partly right, but the amount of time processes like these would save our technicians and the network admin himself would surely account for any extra work which may be needed due to a system being down which is rarely offline for more than 5 minutes a year!
Daniel, this sounds like a very good argument for a backup database server. Perhaps a simple database mirroring setup?