Re: data model and design best practices?

"Alan" <not.me_at_uhuh.rcn.com> wrote in message news:ZP18d.2577$j34.9_at_trndny05...

> Allow me to be the first to ask... Training in what? Your data design and
> modeling group presumably already know how to do this.

A few years back, I was asked to stay on after the end of a contract and help the client put together a database design group.

This was a small office, devoted to an application that ran on DEC gear, but a huge consulting firm, mostly centered around IBM gear. At this site, they had maybe fifty to one hundred programmers, but no one who really knew database design. A lot of their database design was locked in concrete, but more and more new projects needed new design.

They really needed this kind of help. That's not unusual. What's unusual is that they decided to do something about it. They had a manager for the new database design group, and she knew how to manage, but she didn't really know much about database. That made room for somoeone who knew about databases, but didn't know how to manage people. So they kept me on.

They were real pleased with me. I had been hired to fix some database performance problems in about 4 weeks, but they kept me on for a year, as a consultant to this process. I wrote some papers on DB design for them. They were really a rehash of the elementary stuff every DB designer knows, the sort of thing that would have been better done with a few strategic links to web pages, but they didn't give their programmers access to the web. Anyway, this stuff was a real revelation to them. The first two people they hired into the design group were really good, with complementary skills, but they were still pleased enough with me so they offered me a permanent job. If it had been within driving distance from home I would have taken it, and given up consulting. But that's the road not taken.

Anyway, to make the point about something other than myself, the point is this: there are VERY LARGE software organizations out there, that are major players out there in many industires, that HAVEN'T GOT CLUE about database design. Their professionals haven't read the basic textbooks. That suggests to me, very strongly, that they don't know what datbases are for. If they knew what databases were FOR, they would hire the talent that knows how they work. Received on Mon Oct 04 2004 - 13:12:02 CEST