The other day a friend of mine mentioned that they were questioned on one of the scripts they ran recently and they were in fact able to pull that script back up and show them. I was reminded of something I’ve thought about writing several times so it seemed like a good excuse.
An old manager of mine started his team saving all of our work in folders on a shared network space. A few months back I started doing this again, just in sub folder of my documents folder.
In each folder are the scripts that I ran for that request, or at least notes on what I’ve done, assuming a GUI or whatever. And, if the output isn’t too large then I add it too. You’ll also notice that I’ve got a brief description in the folder name for some of them as well.
Now, if a co-worker, auditor, the original requestor, or whoever, needs to see a copy of the code I ran I have it available. And it’s easy to find since it’s listed by request number. The brief description means that if I need some old code (for example a restore process I’m doing over and over again) I can pretty easily find it without having to look up the old request number.
I mentioned that when I first did this it was in a shared location and this had the additional benefit that if one of the DBAs needed to pick up a project in the middle (the original person is out sick, busy, whatever) then they at least have a starting point.
Yes, this does take up some space, but let’s face it, if all you are doing is storing scripts and small (< a couple of mb) outputs you can store a lot of requests before you’ve taken up any kind of significant space.