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I have recently run into several organizations that have had 'problems' because they have private agents in databases in their production environment. All sorts of alarm bells go off - why are they private? Why are they necessary? What are the requirements of the application that support this need?

When you have an agent that is only available to an admin because they occasionally need to go into a database to 'fix' some data, you HAVE to say there is something wrong with the design of the application. Why is the data messed up? Why did the application allow the data to get this way?

And in case you are wondering, the solution is not to create a private agent to fix it this one time, only to leave that agent in the production environment as a part of the overall application design. The correct solution is to prevent users from doing the things that they do to mangle your data. That is one of the requirements for your application, even if it is not explicitly defined. Remember - the customer is always right, and users are allowed to be stupid! And here is a real simple exercise that should be in every application test plan - what happens if you delete a document?

So, spend the time to test your application, and get those features correct so no one has to go in later to 'fix' the data.