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Patrick Smith, a senior DBA at EPX, outlines the benefits of Teamwork as a powerful development and administration tool for oracle. These benefits include enforcement of regulatory frameworks, an advanced Oracle change tracking ability and more.
Question: “Patrick, after experiencing dbMaestro’s TeamWork, what are the top business values you are able to achieve?
Response: “One value is enforcement of regulatory frameworks. Shops using PCI will benefit from the ability to enforce change management practices required by PCI, instead of depending on voluntary adherence to policies (which often fails in fact) or database access privileges (which almost always complicates change implementation and operations). The ability to extend needed privileges to objects, while preventing actual changes to the same, allows change to be restricted to a formal procedure, as dictated by PCI (and other security standards compliance certification agencies). This can streamline certifications during annual PCI audits; avoid the need for remedial activities, and save large numbers of hours demonstrating the effectiveness of non-standard approaches. For those who must meet such regulatory frameworks, dbMaestro can save literally hundreds of hours of technical and administrative time meeting the demands of audits…for each significant system it is used to administer. For large organizations with dozens or hundreds of such systems, the saving could be dramatic, to say the least.”
Question: “Are there other TeamWork values that stand out?”
Response: “Another value is the ability to manage concurrent change threads. Different modification streams working at the same time create disparate baseline environments as such changes proceed. Change reconciliation features in dbMaestro allow these to be reconciled in a manner preventing the migrations of one modification thread from undoing any changes of another modification thread. This becomes especially valuable when any particular change (say, for example a change to a PL/SQL function’s code) may have to be backed out. DbMaestro allows rapid identification of dependencies, not just the function per se, but also to that particular version of it. Thus one can prevent unexpected propagation effects from such a back out.”
Question: “Have you experienced any special capabilities with TeamWork for the Oracle database environment that stands out?”
Response: “The management of any system’s performance is primarily the management of variation. The first thing asked in most performance related events will be “what’s changed”? From an Oracle perspective it’s easy to see what has changed…..but much less easy to see “what’s changed” that can matter to performance. Oracle’s inherent change tracking facility will not provide any details of changes, and it will provide many changes (such as re-compiles, for example) that have no static performance implications. While Oracle’s auditing features can be used to construct a custom method of capturing such changes, dbMaestro provides a highly optimized method with developed graphical user interfaces allowing rapid identification of changes. dbMaestro’s ability to track changes to critical data sets (such as things like code or processing driver tables, for example) extends this to operations on Data as well as on database meta-data changes. In those cases where it may be determined that one or more changes should be ‘undone’, Oracle provides no real effective facility for doing this (the Flashback feature, while useful for a wide range of data state changes, isn’t designed for complex, but limited, rollbacks). DbMaestro can allow back out of combined data and meta-data changes, while automatically identifying any dependent actions required.”
Read more about TeamWork - Oracle Change Management system
Question: “Patrick, how would you summarize what you’ve gained by using TeamWork?”
Response: “dbMaestro provides a vehicle for creating concurrent development environments, and maintaining these at defined levels of change implementation, applying partial as well as full synchronization of change sets as differing development efforts require. By its ability to correlate change sets to projects associated with business needs, the ability to respond to customer needs can be clarified and implemented with greater speed and assurance.”
Learn more about our solution – TeamWork
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