I've always been a little bit of a strong DBA. I try to get along and work with people, being flexible about what rules to implement, but I am somewhat of a stickler for rules. As I was browsing through some blogs one week, I found myself reading about that age-old conflict between DBAs and developers, where the DBA is oppressing the freedom of the Developers.

That plays out all too often, but in this case I found myself wondering what types of things are really important to DBAs. Why do they expend so much energy enforcing rules. I have my own reasons, but I thought an interesting starting point would be to tackle this as a "What rules are most important" or as I wrote it, what's a DBA absolute?

There ended up being some interesting responses, and some I hadn't thought of. One of the most interesting was in teh debate, as a response to someone else, where someone asked about another absolute: Would you be willing to lose or change your jobs because of xx? That was a great question to me, and I hope others realize that if it's an absolute, you would change your job over it. However that's not always practical and could run you into a downward spiral. Most likely our absolutes are really strong feelings, and the extent to which we would enforce them "depends" on the situation more than we'd like.

Why did I write this? I got challenged by Andy Warren

to write a bit about why I wrote something. I complained to him that he

has some "mechanical" posts on this blog that just mention he wrote

something with some questions, and don't really blog about why he wrote

something. He challenged me to write about why I wrote something, so

here I am.