Giving data access to customers
Posted in technology on May 17th, 2008A slashdot article features a question from a nervous database administrator who is worried about giving direct access to a database to a customer. He ends with the plea, “How would you advice me to keep my customer away from my precious tables?”
The right question is, “How can I give my customer better access to reports without compromising security or service availability?” Too often in IT we focus on diplomatic ways of saying “no” instead of seeking creative ways to say “yes”.
If I were in this situation I would draft a proposal for a dedicated server with replicated data. Such a proposal would make it clear that tables may (and likely will) change over time and that they would have read-only access to the secondary server. This would likely result in a happy customer, more revenue and very little impact to operations.