Re: acceptable way to program

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 12:19:15 -0800
Message-ID: <41d9a797$1_3_at_127.0.0.1>


Chas Douglass wrote:

> 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

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