Re: 4 the FAQ: Are Commercial DBMS Truly Relational?

From: Paul <paul_at_test.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:43:20 +0100
Message-ID: <41699ee7$0$54819$ed2619ec_at_ptn-nntp-reader01.plus.net>


Kenneth Downs wrote:
> Have you ever "optimized" the work of others after the fact? I was in a
> situation once where I optimized several programs, gaining performance
> improvements in every case counting between 1-3 orders of magnitude. The
> supervisor was astonished and asked me how I did it. In each case the
> answer was the same, the program was doing too much work. It would do a
> lot of wrong work, and then somewhere do the right work. The entire
> optimization effort was in reducing the program to doing only what was
> necessary. There may have been a couple of tricks-of-the-trade for the
> platform in question, but mostly it was eliminating work.

I've also found that, paradoxically, a lot of the most useful work I've done has actually been getting rid of code, rather than writing it.

Sometimes code is built up piecemeal until you can't really see what it does. Then you delete maybe 90% of the code and it actually works better than before. Of course, you have to be very careful you don't remove some obscure logic that was necessary (maybe a workaround for some rare problem or DBMS bug that wasn't documented properly). But I find usually that, as well as providing performance benefits, such an exercise actually highlights hidden logical errors with the existing code that no-one had every noticed before.

Paul. Received on Sun Oct 10 2004 - 22:43:20 CEST

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