Jim Lawrence (AccessD)
accessd at shaw.ca
Fri May 21 20:02:31 CDT 2004
We back in history...and I remember those days well. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Hale, Jim Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 10:41 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: RE: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various Charlotte, I guess we all have our own prejudices based on our unique experiences but I had to grin at your "rant" because I had almost a mirror image experience. As it happens, I joined a major bank holding Co approx 30 years ago with a newly minted MBA, and the first major dragon I had to slay was designing, programming and implementing a financial reporting and planning system. This task fell to me because the IT dept was incapable of making it happen with the personnel and tools at their disposal and in any case was backlogged 2 years with requests. My recollection of this pre-PC period was a lot of IT shops were swamped because COBOL and FORTRAN were about it. I was able to succeed with a primitive spreadsheet program which ran on an IBM 370, a lot of late nights and a TSO partition (remember those?). I was dangerous with JCL because the system at the time was wide open, but that is another story :-). BTW of the MBAs at the time who worked with and for me, one started a successful NYSE listed company, several have risen to the top of their companies, a couple were indeed congenital idiots and one (Jeff Skilling) was a crook. Regards, Jim Hale -----Original Message----- From: Charlotte Foust [mailto:cfoust at infostatsystems.com] Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 10:09 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: RE: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various Arthur, Certification isn't the answer. About 30 years ago all the major banks decided that they absolutely had to have MBAs in their management structure because these guys must know what they were doing. So they brought in a bunch of whiz kids who lasted a year or two before their employers got wise to the fact that getting a degree didn't mean you knew how to do anything except take tests and defend a thesis in an academic setting. Programming is something of an art, or at the least, a craft, and it takes time and practice to perfect it. Most of the bad stuff you see is because Access has always been marketed as an end user tool, so everyone who can use a wizard thinks of themselves as a developer. I once worked on overhauling an Access project that a major company had paid $250,000 to a "developer" to write. I told them I would have been happy to give them a program that didn't work for a tenth of that! <VBG> The guy *may* have know VB, given the way some of it was written, but he knew sweet damn all about Access/Jet and SQL. Charlotte Foust -----Original Message----- From: Arthur Fuller [mailto:artful at rogers.com] Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 4:32 PM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various Just a note on this bloat subject. I acquired a new client recently, whose DB was 220 MB. They burned me a CD containing same last weekend, so I could work on it while they were closed. Dumbass previous developer hadn't even split it into FE-BE! Everyone was loading the same instance of the whole thing across the net! They had a problem which I fixed. I estimated a day but once I got into it, 3 days elapsed. I split the difference and billed for 2 days. Upon inspection of said database, I discovered some incredible and bizarre anomalies/stupidities. Several tables of critical importance had no PKs and no FK indexes! Unbelievable! Anyway... I split the datbase, then made some mods to the BE which in theory ought to have almost doubled it (i.e. I made copies of every transaction table, but not the static lookup tables). Then I ran compact/repair, and the db came down to (gasp) 40 MB. This includes the doubled tables and the new PK and FK indexes that I added. From 200+ MB to 40 MB -- and this with doubled transaction tables. Once we get the s**t sorted out, I expect that it will come down to 25 MB. I have never programmed in an automatic compact/repair before -- I suppose because I tend to be available and do it as a matter of course. But this app has caused me to rethink that. More seriously, this app has caused me to rethink the virtues of certification. No BE! No PKs! No FK indexes! No wonder the bloddy app was slow with only 20 users on a net! The up side is, it's really easy to look good in a situation like this. The performance gains were spectacular. I got high-fives from all directions :) This is a strange business :) Arthur -- _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com