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This company manages to get by without a database administrator for more than five years with hardly anyone seeing that as a problem, reports a pilot fish on the scene.
"Right up until the system went down for hours after a developer dropped a table from the production environment," fish says. "That's what triggered the hire of the first DBA.
"By that time, the systems had drifted in all kinds of directions: The sysadmin account was used daily by developers to change and access the production environment. The sysadmin credentials were stored in plain text files on web servers. The same backup plan was used for small databases and larger ones.