Re: acceptable way to program
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 12:19:15 -0800
Message-ID: <41d9a797$1_3_at_127.0.0.1>
> Pardon my skepticism, but this could easily be a self-selecting sample,
> could it not?
Could be.
> Aren't you hired as a consultant by companies that have problems in your
> area of expertise (which appears to be DB's)? Aren't your students
> coming to you for that expertise?
Absolutely. But the problems could be database tuning, the problems could be bad SQL or PL/SQL code, the problems could related to network or i/o bandwidth, or a multitude of other reasons: They rarely are.
So while you are possibly correct I do communicate regularly with consultants throughout the US, Canada, and Western Europe and my experience is not unique.
> This appears to be similar to the classic case of the psychiatrist that
> declared that "most people" had psychological problems -- based on his
> experience that most of his patients were, well, crazy.
You've misstated the analogy. We have already agreed that most people are crazy. Now we are diagnosing their specific disorder.
> Of course, this doesn't mean you are wrong. But it does differ from my
> experience -- which is also clearly anecdotal.
All opinions must be by definition as no company is going to lift its kimono for publication to the outside world.
> There are way too few controlled studies in life. To me, even an
> assertion of "most" requires some verification of the methodology and
> population.
If I were publishing in a peer reviewed journal I would agree. This is the usenet and we are usually grateful if the post isn't rude, obscene, or spam.
>>Addressing your second comment I would not say that performance and >>scalability are the most important attributes of a program. But when >>the database is capable of returning a result set in less than a >>second and the Java developer getting the same result set uses a >>method that takes 1-5 seconds there is a major problem and not just to >>the end-user. Often management ends up purchasing far more expensive >>hardware to compensate for bad design, bad implementation, and a lack >>of experience.
>
> If this query occurs once every day, is it still a "major problem"? What
> about once a week?
No such query. Objective research by Oracle and IBM have both shown that the average database hosts, at most, a few hundred unique queries in the lifetime of an application: Rarely are there unique queries except during development.
>>Let me give you some simple examples related to Oracle since that is >>where this has been cross-posted. How many Java developers in your >>organization know about the following? >> >>EXPLAIN PLAN >>TKPROF >>TRACE ANALYZER >>Bind Variables >>Multiversion Read Consistency >>Stored Outlines >>Hints >> >>And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The answer, undoubtedly, is a >>very small number. And yet no serious Oracle DBA or developer would >>consider doing much without one or all of them.
>
> If your point is that any large development project would benefit from
> expertise in the specific database to be used -- that is pretty hard to
> disagree with.
>
> If your point is that every Java programmer needs to be an expert in that
> database -- I would definitely disagree. Hey, it might be nice, but this
> is the real world.
An expert no. But would you let your psychiatrist set a broken leg? They are both MD's. Would you let your auto mechanic work on a Boeing 777 in which you were about to fly to across the Atlantic? They are both mechanics?
So while not an expert knowedgeable enough to be competent.
> (Should we drop comp.databases.oracle from followups? I'm not sure this
> discussion is relevant there any longer. I'm reading this in c.l.j.p but
> I don't know where you are reading it.)
>
> Chas Douglass
I am reading in the Oracle group but it should be noted that last year I taught a JDeveloper class here at the U with one of the people that helped write Hibernate. So I know my way, reasonably well, around Java too.
-- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan_at_x.washington.edu (replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)Received on Mon Jan 03 2005 - 21:19:15 CET