Separation of Duties (Poll Results Discussed)

On the back of the recent patching polls I asked a couple of questions about separation of duties.

As always, the sample size is small and my followers have an Oracle bias, so you can decide how representative you think these number areā€¦

Separation of Duties

Here was the first question.

Regarding GI/DB, do you take advantage of separation of duties? Meaning separate people/groups looking after GI, ASM and DB on the server. Or does the DBA do all of it?

This is exactly what I expected. For the vast majority of companies, the DBAs are responsible for the Grid Infrastructure (GI), Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) and the database (DB).

When Oracle first started floating the idea of separation of duties it kind-of surprised me, as I had never worked with a company that cared about it. Sure they have System Administrators that look after the OS, and maybe provision new disks on the server, but I have never experienced a situation where anyone other than the DBAs do anything with the Oracle side of things.

Don’t get me wrong, if that’s what a company wants to do, it’s good that Oracle make it possible, but I think the vast majority of people just don’t care! What’s more, I think it’s likely to cause more problems than it solves.

GI/DB Ownership

This was the second question, which was suggested by Aishwarya Kala.

Regarding GI/DB installations where the DBAs do all work on the system, have you split the ownership of the GI and DB installations between different users?

It’s interesting that nearly 90% of people have the DBAs doing all the work on the servers, but nearly 50% still split the ownership of the Grid Infrastructure and the database software.

Back in the day nobody talked about separation of duties and the “oracle” OS user owned everything. When discussing separation of duties, Oracle suggested the Grid Infrastructure should be owned by a different OS user, maybe “grid”, and the database carries on as before, typically using the “oracle” OS user. Then the documentation started to push the separation of ownership. Next the installation started to warn you if you used a common user. So now it’s got to the point where people think it is wrong to use a single user as the owner of the GI and database.

I am one of those people that use the “oracle” user as the owner of both the Grid Infrastructure and the database. If you have no separation of duties, I see no point in splitting these between two users. Occasionally I get questions about this in relation to my Vagrant RAC builds, and my response is simple. I don’t work in an environment with separation of duties, so I think splitting the ownership of the GI and database is pointless.

Personally, I think Oracle should remove the warnings from the installer and be more balanced in the documentation. If the poll results of representative of the wider audience, clearly very few people care about separation of duties. It should be an option, not the default assumption.

Cheers

Tim…