Re: Corporate Acceptance of Creating Views ?

In a valiant and sublime effort,Thomas Kyte frowned, dipped a thumb in soot and doodled:

<x-posting reduced>

>Well, its six months later and someone decides to change something. Oh bother,
>go find every report and pull it up in my reporting tool, find the affected
>queries (IF I CAN -- there is yet another cool reason for the view -- I see the
>DEPENDENCY between the view and the base tables) fix them and redeploy the
>report.
>Oh wait, I was using a view, I'll just fix that view and -- there we go. reports
>are back up and running.

Very good point. The main reason for using views, really. Decoupling (OMG, I'm using OO terminology now!...) the schema from the application.

Just had a very good example of this recently. A Java designer/developer insisted on coding all his SQL "to the bone", rather than going through the API we had created (views, packages, functions). Classic Ambler rubbish: stored procedures are "evil", "let me code my own db API", etcetc.

Took him a lot longer and he had to re-learn how to do joins and learn and interpret the entire schema before he could code. We just added a heap of stuff to the schema for further functionality. Broke every single program written to directly access db. Not one survived. The ones coded to use the API are still going.

>
>I don't see why things have to be for the "end user". If that were the case,
>we'd all be programming punch cards with assembler. The developer doesn't
>matter here -- don't give them any tools ( you know, debuggers don't do much for
>end users either do they ).
>

:-)
About time this "end user can do it all" rubbish got debunked! Accessing a corporate database is a serious business. It's not supposed to be "end-user friendly". What is supposed to be that, is the computer system and the application used to access that data, not the db itself. End user friendliness has nothing to do with the dbms engine and its schemata.

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Sat Nov 03 2001 - 18:14:34 CST