Re: design question

Hello Chris,

To understand the DBA point of view, consider these two statements you made:

1. " It is not necessary to access the data otherwise than via the java application. "

The developer looks at the requirements of the specific application he needs to build, and makes choices that seem like a shortcut to him (e.g. let's create a table with only varchar2(4000) columns). I even witnessed a developers team who refused to create primary and foreign keys in the database " in order to keep flexibility".... They saw the database as a necessary part of their application, but choosing correct datatypes, primary keys, and go-with-the-flow of the RDBMS was discarded as too much trouble, with no visible gain to them.

The DBA has a different view: applications ( and languages) come and go, but the database (with it's RDBMS features and the data) is here to stay. The lifespan of the data is often much longer that the initial application.

2) "It's all about data integrity, isn't it? "

Data integrity, performanceproblems , problems when converting the data into a new schema (new application?/ ETL ), scalability etc.

All the subjects that developers normally don't encounter - for some an argument not to care.

the above is just IMHO, i'm not an expert as some others here. Received on Mon Sep 08 2008 - 13:21:55 CDT