I think you have shown a few specific glitches without giving a proper
appreciation of the full horror of the situation. From my point of view, as
a practitioner slaving at the code face, THE overwhelming problem with being
allowed to fob the DBMS off with a null is that it allows the (so-called)
database designer to just sweep a whole lot of inconvenient details under
the carpet.
He "appears" to have produced a complete database design, and that
appearance is reinforced by the fact that he can write an SQL script that
will run without error to create a database. Unfortunately he's done next
to nothing about capturing any understanding of what data the application
will be expected to handle or what the application should (and should not)
do with it. Instead of being forced to discover that there are, for
example, six different types of customer, with different business rules, the
database designer declares a one-shape-fits-all table with a lot of nullable
attributes and leaves me to figure out what is really going on, and to write
the giant tangle of code to make it happen. Gee, thanks. What a hero.
I have come to suspect that *at least* 75% of the many tens of thousand of
lines of code I see in a year are there only because some slack-ass DB
designer didn't want to spec out a few more tables.
Roy
Received on Mon Sep 11 2006 - 18:45:01 CEST
