The Bane of my Life 2358



  • Hi. Newby here. I’m the senior Oracle Applications DBA for a large UK company - and I’m on the verge of resigning over some changes to my role that are being enforced in the name of Sarbanes-Oxley.%0AI hope not to have to explain the distinction between an Oracle Apps DBA and an RDBMS DBA, but, suffice to say, our SOX Auditors, Deloitte, are not happy that I have both privileged access to the database (by which I presume they mean SYS/SYSTEM as well as APPS/APPLSYS) alongside what they call ‘Transactional Business Privileges’ on the applications. By the latter, they mean my access to such responsibilities as Payables Manager, General Ledger Superuser, Purchasing Super User, Receivables Manager, etc.%0ADespite much evidence put their way regarding the logging and monitoring that takes place within the Apps, they have come to the decision that the only way to be complient is to remove any responsibilities from my Apps user account that are to do with money. This potentially takes away 30-40% of my job and reduces my role to little more than an RDBMS DBA (no offence intended, but I regard the differences between the two roles to be significant.)%0AIt should make me laugh that they are happy to leave me with the APPS user account which, with a few well-placed API calls, effectively allows me to do anything at all that I could do using the Oracle Forms - but without all the monitoring and logging that takes place within the Apps. Even this is greeted only with the ‘rules is rules’ response.%0AI cannot believe that my organization is the only one in existence that has to deal with this issue and I’m posting this in the hope that someone out there hears my anguish. I am already communicating with our other Global OpCo’s and intend asking our Oracle account manager to provide us with some reference sites of other companies who have achieved compience for their Oracle eBusiness Suites - whilest still maintaining the need to employ Oracle Apps DBAs amongst their staff.%0AI cannot be a so-unusual breed of Apps DBA that also provides functional support for Finance, HR and Purchasing. Okay, we’ve had contractors in who cannot tell a debit from a credit, but I still feel that they are quite unusual in having little in the way of functional skills.%0AThe SOX section in question is C9021 (which may be an internal reference) which apparently covers ‘Access to System Data.’%0AIf anyone can offer any enlightenment, consolation or even voodoo magic - I’d be very grateful.


Log in to reply