|
|
> Too many new learners treat the database as an afterthougt and don't
> realise
> how important it is for their application to work well. The spectrum is
> broad and yes, it's impossible to gain expertise in all, but a good
> grounding in database essentials is essential if you want to develop
> successfully.
It sure helps. But I've seen PLENTY of bad DB's in my time (and if *I* can
tell it's bad, it must be REALLY bad) that have worked fine for years if not
decades and may likely chug along just fine for some time to come.
I did the front end production on an ecommerce site for a firm that had
outsourced the PHP work. I know enough PHP to see how they were generating
the master product list (maybe 200 items).
They had a PHP loop that, in turn, would query the DB for each item row.
Furthermore, instead of a join, they used multiple queries to get the data
for each row.
For this page to load, it was sending maybe 800 queries.
I pointed this out a few times, but no one cared, and the page load was
maybe 30 seconds as opposed to 10 if they had fixed it. In the grand scheme
of things, it was 'good enough'.
Yea, makes us cringe, but, alas, 'good enough' is often 'good enough'.
(But, no doubt, we as developers should know better! ;o)
-Darrel
|
|