Re: Theory v Practice

These developers are wrong, and the problem is far worse than primary / foreign keys. The fact that your developers would say this indicates they have no knowledge of even the most basic Oracle fundamentals, so they will be making other serious mistakes too. If you have even an ounce of personal integrity you will print out your email and all the responses from this list, and deliver them to your manager, because he/she is currently in charge of a run-away train that's fast heading for Failure City.

There is a single key thing your manager must do. Buy a copy of the book that Tom Kyte and several other authors put together, that describes the fundamentals of how Oracle works. Not the "Expert" book Tom wrote by himself ... the other one on fundamentals he wrote with a few others. The manager should buy one copy of that book for *each* developer and tell them to take it home, read it, and not come back to work until they've finished.

Sound crazy? Think I'm making a joke? Think again. This is, by far, the smartest thing your manager could do, because right now this project is on the fast track to failure, and this single move will pretty much fix the problem.

Meanwhile, you need to get that book too, plus Tom's other book, plus Jonathan Lewis's book ... and inhale them.

Of course this need not be done. If so, there's a 60% chance the project will be just fine until the day it goes into production, when it suddenly become apparent that it's a total failure. There's a 35% chance it will roll out just fine, and from then on be a nightmare in terms of maintenance and performance. And there's a 5% chance things will work out just fine. If you like these odds, just keep going and let these developers do whatever they like.

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 10:45 AM

The developers working on our new VB app are also responsible for setting up the Oracle DB behind it. The app is for an order entry/despatch/warehouse system with >5 million customers and >1000 orders per day. We have nearly 400 tables. They are not planning on using primary keys/secondary keys, as they say they will handle all the constraints via VB.
I only have a theoretical knowledge of database design, which says this is very wrong. Is the Oracle system being used as anything more than an expensive file system? In real world scenarios, is this a common practice?

Regards

Craig Healey

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