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

From: Kenneth Downs <firstinit.lastname_at_lastnameplusfam.net>
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:08:58 -0400
Message-ID: <ad8ckc.jf9.ln@mercury.downsfam.net>

Paul wrote:

> 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.

I think you explained it better than I did.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Use first initial plus last name at last name plus literal "fam.net" to
email me

Received on Sun Oct 10 2004 - 16:08:58 CDT