Common Human Errors as DBA (Part 3)


 

In continuation of the series of “Common Human Errors as DBA” – here I am posting Third Part of it. You may check others here. Part 1 & Part 2

Poor naming standards & Lack of documentation: This is a common mistake (not human error) that frequently happens. From the very beginning, a DBA must setup naming standards and must communicate ‘standards’ to all stakeholders. Setting up an environment which has all naming standards in place is very easy to manage and helps others to understand quickly. Missing control over naming standard can be considered as Human Error though. So, to prevent,

  • You may create a scheduled report to show the list of objects which are not meeting the standards.
  • You must communicate your standards; especially to Developers
  • You must not allow exceptions when it comes to standards

Added indexes to every column in a table for best performance: This can be consider as human error that without evaluating existing indexes on other columns, during a course of time, a DBA created indexes on all (or most of the) columns. And top of it, DBA forgot that indexes need maintenance too. DBA needs to be careful about index selection and their maintenance. I could not figure out any prevention method for this. I can say, “Be careful as always”. However, if you have some suggestions, please feel free to add comments below in the post.

Gave database user DBO or SA rights: Sometimes, in non-production environment, while troubleshooting issues, DBA may need to elevate access for a database user. Once DBA finds the root cause, DBA must revoke elevated access as quickly as possible. I have seen some cases where DBA felt excited after fixing those issues and forgot to revoke access. This eventually caused issues at the end of the day. To prevent this,

  • A weekly Audit report can be created and delivered to DBAs for review.
  • An alerting system can be created if there is any change with permissions.
  • Changes should be tracked in Incident or Change documentation.

 

Hopefully this series helped you. Stay tuned.