A few weeks ago Grant Fritchey (b|t) posted about DevOps, the DBA , and the word “No”. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait right here.
Welcome back. As you’ve just read, Grant ranted a little on the concept that the DBA does nothing but say no to requests, and that people still live the belief that it’s their default response to anything.
The whole concept of the DBA saying no really comes about because the people that are responsible for getting up in the middle of the night, because somebody did something crazy that broke the site, are not fans of a lack of sleep. Hey, if you knew that there was a not-null probability of losing an evening, or a weekend, wouldn’t you be hesitant to allow changes as well.
I spent many years as that gatekeeper. The one that didn’t want to lose that time. I didn’t want to spend my time saying no, but I knew for darn sure that I wanted to understand what was going in and what the potential impact was going to be. After all, I’d rather spend my time figuring out how to simplify managing my enterprise than trying to figure out what was broken with the latest release.