How can you respond to this...

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How can you respond to this...

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Matt Miller (4) SSC Guru Points: 124210 More actions · Answer 1

Look at it on the bright side - being "invaluable" means lots of consulting (and NOT for free, for real) once you leave... You might even get paid what you're worth for once (or a lot closer to it:))

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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

Key DBA SSCertifiable Points: 6029 More actions · Answer 2

David,

I feel for you!

You mentioned that your company business deals with clinic/insurance. If you are an insurance company, I assume that you have an accrediting body that certifies your covered lives. Going on that assumption, your accrediting body will conduct periodic audits to ensure all aspects of the company are in compliance. If this is the case, and there is no clearly defined process to prove your disaster recovery strategy, security best practices, from a database perspective, the accrediting body could strip your company of it's accreditation at worst, at best they will mandate what needs to be put in place to make the company compliant. If you have a good rapport with the CIO and/or the CFO, run this "what if" scenario by both of them, and see how they react. That may give the IT Director enough rope to hang him/herself.

As others have suggested, document your findings, cover your own areas of responsibility, which it seems you are doing to the best of your ability.

From what I have seen, it takes an unrecoverable data loss or "in the newspaper" security breach to get a DBA hired, but as we all know here, it is too late at that point.

Hope This Helps

"Key"
MCITP: DBA, MCSE, MCTS: SQL 2005, OCP

S Hodkinson SSCertifiable Points: 7529 More actions · Answer 3

I second Damon. Try pointing out the articles about the lost personal data which we've had in the UK. If a clinic/insurance company lost all or part of the peresonal data on its clients, I'd bet someone would sue. That ought to concentrate the mind.

:Whistling:

Madame Artois

David Lester Hall of Fame Points: 3647 More actions · Answer 4

Thanks again for the insight, luckily (maybe) the admin did listen to me and our databases have no public connections, (behind hardware and software firewalls and and such), and our internet presence is outsourced.

The multiple audit panels have hit us before on having no disaster recovery plan, which prompted the creation of one. I was part of that, the plan satisfies the audits, yet has had no testing, and under the surface really just says, "IT will come in an figure out something".

Again fortunately (seems odd) we do have hiccups in the system every few weeks, nothing critical, however rather inconvienient, these are the events I keep plugging away with. I do think eventually I will get enough understanding in admin to have them actually push for a DBA as well. (I turn out to not be the only one who continues to ask about it, even the vendor of our core business software strongly suggests having a DBA to maintain their Oracle DB.)

Loner SSC-Insane Points: 21279 More actions · Answer 5

The last company I worked for was a big company too, at least it was within the fortune 500 list. It had a ERP system JD Edwards running on AS400 using DB2, a data warehouse using SQL Server and two planning tools - Kalix and Logility using UNIX and oracle 10g. There was not one single DBA on board for any of the database. It had a AS400 Administrator (part time), he had other duties too, no window administrator, no UNIX administrator. When I found out, I was surprised there was no big disaster happening so far and the company was still running.

As for SQL Server, my manager insisted that all the developers should know all the administrative work (He wished!!!!!!!) Most of them did not even know what a tempdb was or used sp_who2 to find out who was on the system.

Anyway this company is not alone. I was looking for a job for the past six months. Most of the SQL jobs required candidate to have DBA experience, an expert in T-SQL, trigger, DTS, views and data modeling, plus ETL experience and data warehouse experience. If you don't believe me, you can go to Monster.com and at least half of the SQL jobs have the above requirements!!!!!