Database administrators touch a lot of servers in their day-to-day duties.  We do a lot of troubleshooting, security testing, and run a lot of utilities for everything from performance monitoring to development servers.

In a perfect world, the database admin changes their domain password frequently.  When the password changes, the DBA knows pretty quickly if any software is running under that domain account because it starts to fail.  However, some other things like SQL jobs may also be running under the DBA’s login, and those may not run every day.  It may take a while to unearth all of the security problems.

To be proactive, disable the database administrator’s domain account several days before they leave.  (This assumes, of course, that the DBA gave at least two weeks notice!)  Afterwards, go through all of the database servers & applications and make sure they stay up.

That way, if something breaks, the DBA is still around to help fix things – instead of being long gone.

And yes, since this is my last week at Southern Wine, I’ll be disabling my login in advance too!