Re: IO function metric.

On Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:22:01 +0000, Mladen Gogala wrote:

Here is a typical "in your face" reply by HJR on the OTN:

Re: Lgwr & dbf Files....
Posted: Jul 8, 2008 2:10 AM in response to: Aman.... in response to: Aman....
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You are a multi-billion dollar corporation with a successful RDBMS product that is the market-leading software in its class.

Your requirements are to keep on releasing new versions of your product to keep the market satisfied in its search for innovation and novelty. You are also required not to break your product when doing this, because otherwise you will annoy all your customers and start losing market share. You still remember what happened when you released version 6 of your product too early and in a functionally-challenged form! You do NOT want to repeat that mess, no siree!

You have a piece of code dating from the dark ages that enables every background process to check for the existence of files at instance startup. It's pretty archaic in that it means processes which don't have anything to do with datafiles still end up checking for their existence at startup.

Do you (a) remove this archaic code as part of a code cleanup or (b) leave it there, given that having a process check for the existence of files at startup doesn't take much time and doesn't do any harm, even if it doesn't actually server a good purpose these days?

My guess is that (b) will be the option you take every time. Removing code like this, buried in a whole heap of startup bootstapping complexity is something that is (1) fundamentally unnecessary (it's doing no harm, after all!); (2) is fraught with the risk of breaking things. And (3) is a distraction when you're trying to concentrate on a whole lot of new, sexy stuff... bootstrap code that's worked since version 5 without fundamental alteration is not where your interests lie or where you're likely to find much motivation.

Thanks Howard wherever you are!

-- 
Mladen Gogala
http://mgogala.freehostia.com