Re: Build your own car

  • From: "Daniel W. Fink" <optimaldba@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 10:50:30 -0600

These are my personal opinions and do not reflect any employer/client that I have worked for in past or work for currently.

I'm not sure it relates to Oracle, but it sure relates to IT. (for those of you who have already heard my rant on this, you can delete the email right now).

Imagine if we used the same process to build cars (or houses or planes or ...) as we do to build database applications. In almost all of the systems I have worked on, there is no architecture, no engineering, no testing...code it with the latest technology and toss it into production.

Company A - develops medical information systems. Every product (and I mean EVERY) must pass a very stringent set of testing procedures to even make it out of development. Why? Imagine the impact of a coding mistake in a blood-bank or pharmacy application? "Oops, I'm sorry I forgot error-handling, but I'm sure John is in a better place, widow Smith." I worked on a business side app that would not have this kind of impact, but we were required to pass the same tests. Pain in the butt? Certainly. But I learned a great deal about how to develop and test properly.

Company B - (a bunch of companies rolled into one to protect the guilty). Failures during testing were not cause to delay deployment to production. Failures in production deployments were not cause to stop the deployment and roll back. Development staff included folks with degrees in finance, music, philosophy and psychology. Yes, they could write java, but had no clue as to how to interact with the database. They could not even design a data warehouse properly. The dw was an exact (yes EXACT) copy of the oltp system...worked great for 6 months...then the performance rapidly decreased to the point where the application was unusable.

Imagine a plane built by philosophy and music majors. They see a bus... know that it carries a load of people long distances...so they use that model to create a plane. They don't study aerodynamics, metallurgy, etc. Would you fly in that?

Once again...cynically,
Daniel Fink



Bobak, Mark wrote:

Ok....interesting....but how does it relate to Oracle?



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