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For me, this is an example of DevOps being carried too far.

What is to stop developers for checking into Github "drop database; drop table; alter index; create table; create database; alter permission;"? They are automating environment builds and so that is more efficient right? In my career, I have seen a Fortune 100 company's core system down and out for a week because of hubris like this. In large companies, data flows downstream from a core system. When you have to restore from backup, that cascades into restores in all the child systems.

Similarly, I once had to convince a Microsoft Evangelist who was hired into my company, not to redeploy our production database, every-time we had a production deployment. He was a pure developer and did not see any problems of dropping the database, recreating the database, and re-inserting all the data. I argued that a) this would take 10+ hours b) the production database has data going back many years and that the schema/keys/rules/triggers have evolved during that time-- meaning that many of the inserts would fail because they didn't meet the current schema. He was unconvinced but luckily my bosses overruled him.

My bosses were business types and understood accounting. In accounting, once you "post" a transaction to the ledger that becomes permanent. If you need to correct that transaction, then you create a new one that "credits" or corrects the entry. You don't take out the eraser.



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