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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Why Use Anydata? DBA Woes
I suspected it was being used Rachel's objections. In the past I've read many messages where DBA's have threatened to quit over such things; not so much any more as the IT job market is not great. Certainly no such insult as anydata would ever appear in the database against a DBA's say so. However, in this case, management felt the cost of rewriting the system was more than the cost of living with anydata. I'd guess many of us are faced with similar issues, We win many/most of these arguments, but lose a few. Then, we need to obtain acceptable performance in a database which is not completely designed as we would like, and develop work arounds for the problems we foresaw.
This not only happens with database design, but with hardware choices as well. There are certainly hardware choices and designs too awful to overcome. It is against these we need to be most vociferous in our warnings reminding everyone that problems will compound as the user base grows. We need to draw to management's attention any bad design/hardware choice. But we also need to be honest in describing the costs of employing a bad choice. One's credibility is toilet-bound if management rules the other way, and the predicted disaster never occurs.
Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.edu
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 3:28 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
we are using a generic data model (and the procedures to access the data within the model) from a third party consultant who wrote all of his work against a SQLServer database. SQLServer, and Sybase, have a datatype called 'variant' which has the equivalent functionality of the anydata datatype, i.e. the ability to store different datatype data in the same column (for this model, because it IS generic, it is possible for the data to be stored in that column to be numeric, character or date)
Since we did not have the time to redesign the model (which was the whole point of hiring this consultant) we needed to go with ANYDATA.
We are rewriting his procedures into PL/SQL and that is where the error is occurring.
I started the discussions on the list a few months back by asking about the datatype. I was, and am, opposed to using it for this. But I am neither the data modeler for this app nor the DBA and my opinions were ignored.
Rachel
--- "MacGregor, Ian A." <ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
> I remember when anydata was first discussed a few months ago. I
> questioned how it could be part of proper database design; from what
> domain would the anydata column draw its values? As I recall
> everyone advised against its use, "It is a bad idea in Access and so
> it is in Oracle." was the gist of the comments. One wag proposed
> having two fields in the database, a sequence based primary key and
> the anydata field. Apparently that person was too shy to rely on
> rowid's :)
>
> Why did you decide to use anydata? How does it benefit to your
> application? It strikes me as a bad idea, but I have not researched
> it at length.
>
> Ian MacGregor
> Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
> ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.edu
>
>
-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Rachel Carmichael INET: wisernet100_at_yahoo.com Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: MacGregor, Ian A. INET: ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.EDU Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).Received on Mon Oct 07 2002 - 13:19:49 CDT
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