RE: DBA Hacks Book
- From: Carel-Jan Engel <cjpengel.dbalert@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 21:27:15 +0200
Rob,
It is nice to see people using stuff you developed in a way you've never
intended.....
From mid 80's to early 90's I was working in R&D teams, building
programming languages, so-called 4GL stuff, report geereators etc. etc.
I've always admired programmers using my tools in totally unexpected ways.
From this perspective, it was not 'how to prevent the user from doing this
or that', but 'hey, what I built is more useful then ever designed'.
The best example I remember was a report writer that I wrote in '91, based
on a preditive parser architecture. It could be used together with
WordPerfect, because that has a nice tagged file-format. It's still used.
A textblock would be opened with a table reference and some simplified
expressions. Blocks could be nested. Every block resulted in a query, and
the contents of the block were iterated for any row returned. Columnnames
within the block got replaced by the contents of the column. Bold
columnname: bold column contents, etc. It worked very good and fast, and
was a very nice tool for mail-merging and creating reports with a lot of
text. The reportwriter was available on Dos, Windows and Unix, Standalone
and as a Forms3.0 user-exit. Alas, I never saw any money for it, I
developed it for my employer those days, who sold it far too cheap to
another company. But the tool survived.
Then the users started to invent unforeseen problems for this tool: Create
a block with an expression, include text, but no columns. This resulted in
modular letters, dynamically put together from textblocks, depending on
generated queries against the Oracle database.
The best application was using it for printing passports and driving
licences: the software vendor didn't want to write all kinds of printer
drivers, and implented the whole stuff with my program. WordPerfect would
take care of the different printers on the market, and the scanned
signature of the mayor, stamps and data of the owner were placed on the
document with an accuracy of 0,01 cm.
You are totally right in a situation where a user should be prevented to
create an imbalanced General Ledger: the application shouldn't allow that.
However, I've always lived with the opinion that it is the user who has to
do the thinking, and the program is just a tool. Some decades ago, when
people were writing down all the figures manually, there was no tool
withelding them from messing up. A tool (program) that tries to catch every
exception or anomaly will be hard to maintain and probably unusable because
of inflexibility. Saying this, I still consider myself as a good
programmer. Programming isn't about being perfect, being more perfect than
expected, but about meeting the specs and the requirements, to the level of
quality agreed and for the cost estimated beforehand. Using an American
Screwdriver to drive a screw into the wood is your own responsibility. ( I
don't know of other countries, but in The Netherlands an American
Screwdriver is also know as a Hammer).
Most programmers thes days are like toddlers, playing with hammers, nails
and chain-saws. Good parents wouldn't allow them access to those tools.
Todays damagement doesn't seem to care about the level of maturity of their
developers (let them developers start to develop themselves before touching
anything else...), but give their toddler-developers a nice playground with
all sorts of dangerous tools. And, the management sits back totally
flabbergasted when accidents happen.
Just my 0.02C
Best regards, Carel-Jan
At 03:40 PM 6/18/2004, you wrote:
> >> I work with developers who use our databases all the time in ways that
> aren't anticipated but I can't discuss it without a lot of unfriendly
> language.
>
>Here we go again?
>In prehistoric times (about 1980) when I started to learn to program, one
>of the first things I learned that if a user does something that you
>hadn?t anticipate, it was not the fault of the user. Of course it only
>meant that the programmer didn?t use his brains enough to foresee these
>things. He should make a better program, and certainly NOT try to explain
>to the user that ?he shouldn?t do that and that?; no, if he was a real
>programmer, the user could NEVER even do ?that and that?.
>
>The sentence above only means to me, that the person who developed the db
>in question should try to work smarter instead of complaining!
>
>Greetings,
>
>Rob Zijlstra.
>
>
>
===
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. (Derek Bok)
===
DBA!ert, Independent Oracle Consultancy
Kastanjelaan 61C
2743 BX Waddinxveen
The Netherlands
tel. +31 (0) 182 640 428
fax +31 (0) 182 640 429
mobile +31 (0) 653 911 950
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