I'm currently discussing with my Oracle DBA Collegue that request a root access on our production servers.

I'm not so hot to let him use the root access on our production servers. He is arguing that he need it to perform some operations like restarting the server and some other obscure arguments.

The point is that I'm not agree with him because I've set him a Oracle user/group and a dba group where Oracle user belong. Everything is running smoothy and without any root permissions for now.

I also think that all administrative tasks like scheduled server restart and so one need to be operated by the proper administrator (The Systems administrator on our case) to avoid any kind of issues related to a misunderstanding of the infrastructure interactions.

So, I need the help of both, sysadmins and Oracle DBAs to lead me on the correct direction.

If my collegue really need this rights I'll give him, but I'm just basically quite affraid of that because of security and integrity concerns.

I know that my collegue is really good as a Oracle DBA and he know is work very well, but I also know that I've very few cases where a software and its admin really need root access.

Once again, I'm not looking for pros/cons but rather an advice on the way that I should take to deal with this situation.