Re: Agility and Data Design (was: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL)

From: Marshall Spight <mspight_at_dnai.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 01:46:20 GMT
Message-ID: <Mv%lb.5734$9E1.26853@attbi_s52>

"Mike Preece" <michael_at_preece.net> wrote in message news:1b0b566c.0310231728.4e643b71_at_posting.google.com...

>

> As for the number of lines of code - again I'm afraid I can't comment,
> I've never bothered to count. I suspect though that none of them would
> have required a million lines of code. Maybe? Dunno. I can say that,
> given the lifespan of many of those systems, it is not all that
> unusual for the apps to have been written and maintained by a hundred
> different developers - over the course of 20 or so years. The majority
> of businesses running Pick would have had an IT staff of 1 or 2 - if
> any at all. Some, although not very many, have had a hundred
> developers working on them at the same time. Some of the Pick systems
> out there are critically important - I'm talking "matter of life and
> death" stuff here! Do you really think these systems would be running
> if data corruption was "a way of life"?

Well, it sounds like what you're describing falls into the category of what I was describing as smaller homogeneous systems, where I said it "may work well enough." If everything is written in the same language, it's a good deal easier to write your integrity enforcement code procedurally. (I still think that's a worse technique than declarative integrity enforcement, but you may offset the cost by gains in other areas.)

Marshall Received on Thu Oct 23 2003 - 20:46:20 CDT