Recently I went to see an Oracle presentation on storage. Since they have bought Sun, they have been doing some…
Instantly digestible error messages are so important. Why do so many systems have such pathetic error handling routines? And sometimes, none at all?
If you want to make a Cobol system, write your system with flat files and use Cobol. Or C. The system will run much faster than using a database.
In some shops, to understand the system, you look everywhere, except at the data model. It’s the “meaningless model”.
Do you use the VIN, or the license plate to identify a car in the DMVs system? The choice has huge implications!
There are a lot of systems using Cobol out there these days. Even though the systems were built on top of Oracle databases from the start!
Duplicate data. How can I count the ways?
Another bizarre database design is to split up a table vertically. In other words, to have duplicate tables!
MUCK: Massively Unified Code-Key, Generic Three Table Data Models cause lots of problems: Awful performance, Pivots, Require multiple inline views, data type Issues, really complex inserts, increased people time, cost, and create a Cobol system. Just say no!
There was a functional dependency, violating 2NF. The first field, determined the second field. This of course should have been moved into another table, but it wasn’t.