Software development best practices....

[JerryMungo]

Tell him he can have his access if he has written approval from a director.

Office wars are not fought with references to best practice guides.

He is the director for this project

Its not your average project or firm, most people on this project are externals.

 

[zippy]

There are best practises and then there is management

 

[CamiKaze]

I honestly think that the client is trying to understand the internals of your application to one day cut support from your company and build their own application, based on something similar to your DB.

If it's not in the contract to disclose IP then don't do it. It was never agreed upon.

 

[ViperGTI]

Perhaps give him a sandbox copy of the database as recommended above. If he wants to make changes, make him fill out a change control document for each change, detailing exactly what must be added / changed with a motivation for the change. Once approved by you, you can make the change for him on the actual database.
That way, he can have his requested changes and you maintain control, ensuring that there are no breaking changes.

 

[JerryMungo]

I honestly think that the client is trying to understand the internals of your application to one day cut support from your company and build their own application, based on something similar to your DB.

If it's not in the contract to disclose IP then don't do it. It was never agreed upon.

Oh, no need for that - we develop open source and open access solutions. Part of our work is to train client's developers on taking over after the project is done. Funded by public $ means you have to do that to be able to compete in the market.

 

[JerryMungo]

Perhaps give him a sandbox copy of the database as recommended above. If he wants to make changes, make him fill out a change control document for each change, detailing exactly what must be added / changed with a motivation for the change. Once approved by you, you can make the change for him on the actual database.
That way, he can have his requested changes and you maintain control, ensuring that there are no breaking changes.

It looks like this is the route we'll go for.

Thanks for the advice guys!

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

...

On second thought I would not allow this, some of my table designs are hard to work out and I wouldn't want to give away my intellectual property.

....

First time I've ever heard somebody make this claim about their schema ... LOL

Perhaps you should reconsider your approach and brush up on your database skills if your table designs are complicated.

 

[Nemeses]

@WoDotNant, sorry to reply so late... Have you found your way around this?

Im very curious to know how this all panned out