In my many years on the board of directors of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), I frequently exhorted our members to strive for individual achievement and personal excellence. One of the best paths for many SQL Server professionals is through certification, especially if they lack years of demonstrated on-the-job experience. However, certification only paints half the picture. While it might demonstrate, at a minimum, that you passed a test (or several tests) about the database technology, it tells nothing about your standards for good conduct.

Many professions, as they have matured over the generations, have established professional codes of ethics and standards of conduct that indicate the bottom bar for how members of that profession should behave. Consider these examples:

• The title of Professional Engineer, conveyed around the world, calls upon its members to adhere to seven fundamental canons, including that they hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and perform services only in areas of their competence.
• Professional journalists are expected to-among other measures of good conduct-question the motives of sources before promising anonymity; never plagiarize; avoid distorting the content of news photos or videos; and make certain their content does not misrepresent the facts, oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
• The Project Management Institute, which sets standards for professional project managers, espouses numerous high-level and subordinate standards to ensure the basic framework for project management is applied consistently around the world. For example, one high-level aspirational standard for professional engineers is respect. The mandatory standards of respect include negotiating in good faith, respecting the property rights of others, never acting in an abusive manner, and not exercising power or influence to personally benefit at the client's expense.

Getting closer to our own career as database professionals, the Association for Computing Machinery posits a number of general moral imperatives and professional responsibilities. The general moral imperatives make good, common sense and include such aspirations as avoiding harm to others and contributing to society and human wellbeing. The more specific professional responsibilities include accepting and providing appropriate professional review and giving comprehensive and thorough evaluations of computer systems, including analysis of possible risks. The ACM also defines a variety of very specific codes of conduct for such professionals as software engineers.

When I think about these other professions, I'm also forced to consider some of the "DBAs behaving badly" stories that I've heard and, in a few cases, actually seen transpire. For example, I can think of at least a dozen times when I've either known or heard of a DBA who didn't bother to take backups on an important database. In other cases, I've known DBAs who took backups, but never bothered to make sure they were useable or verified. I've encountered DBAs and database consultants who advocated for a specific product only because they were getting a kickback from the vendor, despite the existence of better products. If you've been in the business for any length of time, I'm sure you also can recall these types of "breaches" of good professional ethics.

I would like to see this initiated as a topic of discussion among database professional organizations such as PASS, IOUG, and IDUG. I think a code of conduct, or standards of ethics, would not only be applicable to DBAs of all stripes, but also serve as an improvement to our profession as it marks its constant maturation and importance to the world of IT. It also would help employers to recognize potential job candidates possessing the highest caliber and moral standards.