Nobody here proposed looking at Industry Standards. Why do we like to
re-invent the wheel? I know that Tony hates to research, follow
Standards and all that other stuff that get in the way of a "agile/
extreme/ cowboy coder" image -- and job security :). But why did Roy
miss the entire music industry? This is the guy who knows about
additive congruential methods of generating values in pseudo-random
order!
I offer that we are still thinking like "procedural coders" and NOT
like "database people" instead. We re-invent the wheel because it is
fun. It is also faster than research -- Hey, why look for a relational
key with all its validation and verification rules, documentation,
updating, etc. when you can use IDENTITY mindlessly and effortlessly
to mimick a pointer-based DBMS or "roll your own" encodings !
I did a 30 minute consulting job two Christmasses for a mail order BBQ
company. The problem involved packing boxes. Everyone else who posted
to the question was trying to write a "3D Tetris" program. I realized
that they had over 4 years of shipping data with Fed Ex. Do a
relational division on the shipments. Find the minimal box size/dry
ice combo used for each shipment. Put that experience in a look-up
table with about 8000 rows. Hnadle the 0.2% stuff not in the table as
an exception. Go home in 30 minutes or less. Oh, the query runs
10,000 times faster than the "Tetris" proposals.
Comments?
Received on Fri Jan 20 2006 - 06:36:43 CET