The Importance of Standards

Throughout my career I have worked on a number of projects where standards where minimal. You have seen this type of shop—the servers may be named after superheros or rock bands. When the company has ten servers and two employees it’s not that big of a deal. However, when you scale up and suddenly become even a small enterprise, these things can become hugely important.

A good example is having the same file system layout for your database servers—without this it becomes hugely challenging to automate the RDBMS installation process. Do you really want to spend your time clicking next 10 times every time you need a new server?

One of my current projects has some issues with this—it is a massive virtualization effort, but the inconsistency of the installations, not following industry best practices, and the lack of common standards across the enterprise have led to many challenges in the migration process. Some of these challenges include inconsistent file system names, and even hard coded server names in application code. I did a very similar project at one of my former employers who had outstanding standards and everything went as smoothly as possible. 

What standards do you like to enforce? The big ones for me are file system layout (e.g. having data files and transaction/redo logs on the same volume every time, whether it is D:\ and L:\, or /data and /log) and server naming (having clearly defined names makes server location and identification easier). Some other standards I’ve worked with in the past include how to perform disaster recovery for different tiers of apps or which tier of application is eligible for high availability solutions.