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Why are developers touching production systems? (Score:1)
The right place to start your question is asking how the release cycle works. Hopefully you have a development/QA/production cycle already. In that case I'd use the QA step as your useful bottleneck to make this problem tractable.
Developers in development can do whatever they like. That includes messing up their development machines. But when they check code in, they must include unit tests for new database features, and they need to document database changes. Part of preparing a QA release is preparing the upgrade procedure that merges all of the database changes that were documented. It must be able to take an old installation and upgrade it to a machine that can pass all unit tests (and also passes QA).
After that, then your job is to write a procedure that can take a machine down, apply the upgrade, then put it back into production.
The nice thing about this is that now you don't need to worry about the locking issues (that's now a procedure problem), and you also can limit your worries about developers directly breaking production (they shouldn't touch it).
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