Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I saw an interesting post on Niall's blog this evening titled "DBA as User". This is an interesting discussion started on AskTom and continued by Niall in his blog post. The question is should DBA's alter and meddle with data in the database? - this is a controversial one. If the data is corrupted and the business is down then most likely it will happen that the DBA will fix the data. I can understand Tom's view that DBA's should not alter the application data just the same as a DBA should not alter the dictionary. This is a good discussion on AskTom and also in the comments on Niall's blog.

I agree with the no action lobby, the data should not be altered under any circumstances unless it is a last resort. There should be audit and constraints in place. Altering data without detailed knowledge of its structure and schema can cause more issues than are fixed. I can see that last resort cases occur when data has to be fixed but this should be done by consultants who understand the schemas and also the business. Ideally the applications and API's should be used to fix data not DBA's with SQL.

good post!