Clearly, I'm missing something. Either that, or I'm horribly spoilt. Just for clarification, we're talking about playing around on a development computer. A computer, disk (or disk array), an entire RDBMS that's isolated from the primary production system, and preloaded with simulation data, right?

What protection? There shouldn't be any real data in there. I come from an environment where for the past 15 years, the computer names of some computers was classified as top secrete. Likewise, the data in them, was sometimes Eyes Only. Creating bogus data took some consideration and review, but it's mostly a one-shot thing.

What are you protecting? Doesn't the DBA/System Admin have a ghosted (or eqivalent) image? I mean, hey, crash it, wipe it out -- hell, beat it with a stick, they just wipe it clean and start over.

Clearly, I'm missing something. I'm shocked that this is even debatable! Put me down for the developer has free reign on a development box. Especially developers that know little to nothing about database management, development, etc.