I am in total agreement with herveus. My advice to you is to refer back to the specification. What is actually required? What is the impact of a blank value on applications that use the database?

What might be likely in your case is that there is no written specification, in which case, your approach of escalating the decision is the correct thing to do. I also think that the coding of Sql*Loader scripts, along with triggers and stored procs is a developer role rather than a DBA role. Depending on your company's management structure, I would think that the decision needs to be referred to and owned by the development team and its manager.

In terms of whether you are being weasel or not, I don't think you are - you are just being professional. Welcome to the world of office politics.

This whole scenario you are facing sounds awfully familiar. A year ago, I was on an assignment where I was tasked with design and implementation of the "Interfaces" component of a bank transaction processing system.

Being a skilled scriptor with knowledge of Sql*Loader, I devised templates for the various files that had come from other systems. I was also wearing other hats, including business analyst and system tester.

The realisation that nothing was defined about handling blank values on incoming data fields prompted me to ask the project manager to call a high level meeting to discuss the processing of received input data. Present at this meeting were technical staff responsible for supplying the source data and non-technical users from the business side. I found myself explaining the problem in plain English, and getting agreement, firstly that there was an issue. Secondly, an action plan was formed to get every input field defined. This resulted in a appendix to the functional specification which went through a formal signoff process.

The interfaces component proved to be one of the least problematic parts of this project and application.

--
I'm Not Just Another Perl Hacker

In reply to Re: (OT) Am I weasel or just right? by rinceWind
in thread (OT) Am I weasel or just right? by Anonymous Monk

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