Ten Worst Things to do In a Database – Day 3
We are working on building a list of the "Ten Worst Things to do in a Database". I developed a list of 15 items to start out the conversation. Yesterday we had a lot of feedback from readers. Today is the last day to add new items to the list.
Starting tomorrow (Thursday) you have an opportunity to help determine which are our top 10 worst things to do in a database. I’m going to consolidate everything that has been submitted, and post it in Thursdays newsletter at which point you can start voting. You may send in your vote for the three items you think are the worst. I’ll let you know how to submit your vote in the Thursday newsletter.
Here are the responses that came in today. I really appreciate how many areas I didn’t think of originally.
Barry:
This actually happened to me a number of years ago. I and one of my fellow programmer/developers were working late 2 consecutive nights to track down a bug in a C program which was doing Oracle database access. Finally late on the 2nd night we discovered that the DBA had changed the name of one of the columns in a database table and did not tell anyone about the change ! So when our program tried to access the column which no longer existed it crashed !
Bob:
Not do a Logical DB design before putting up any tables.
Not do a functional data design before doing a logical DB design
Not do a conceptual data design (normalized) before doing a functional data design
Not do data analysis on business requirements before doing a conceptual design
Not gather business requirements before doing the analysis.
Janet:
Do not use newid() in a GUID field that is the Primary Key & clustered. Use newsequentiadid(). This creates a physical sort based on a random GUID.
Do not over-normalize the database… it kills performance.
Use GUIDs only when necessary .. choose int or bigint datatypes when a surrogate is found necessary over a natural key.
Do not use too many indexes to compensate for poor design.
Learn what a clustered index is and choose which column it should be applied to. It isn’t always the Primary Key column.
Patti:
"we talked about this in our DBA meeting today, they were building BO universes by combining two marts, another worse thing to do….."
Send your additions to me at facebook (I can become your friend and you can answer my question there or send me a note), twitter or btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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