Re:3 Rules of Database App Aging
by chime on Friday January 16, 2009 @10:56AM
(#436756)
> If you find yourself making all fields optional or needing only many-to-many relationships, that's a sure sign that you already did something wrong when you designed the data base.
Not really. Business rules change because the nature of business changes. Over-engineering databases to account for future changes takes a lot of time and effort. If the company does not sell outside of US and does not have plans to sell outside of US anytime soon, I would not spend a week implementing Norwegian, UAE, and Indian addressing and tax/tariff system.
When I designed the payroll system for my company, I took into account that hourly employees can get promoted and become salaried. This happens once a quarter or two and the system can deal with it. Now if a salaried employee wants to become an hourly employee, my system cannot auto-calculate the change in their vacation days etc. It would require a considerable amount of time for me to build that functionality in. However, it is possible for this situation to happen but in five years, it has only happened once. In that instance, I manually edited the records and documented the entries. So does that mean I designed the database schema poorly? No it just means I did not want to make it so rich and extensive that it can handle every remote case, just most of them.
Not really. Business rules change because the nature of business changes. Over-engineering databases to account for future changes takes a lot of time and effort. If the company does not sell outside of US and does not have plans to sell outside of US anytime soon, I would not spend a week implementing Norwegian, UAE, and Indian addressing and tax/tariff system.
When I designed the payroll system for my company, I took into account that hourly employees can get promoted and become salaried. This happens once a quarter or two and the system can deal with it. Now if a salaried employee wants to become an hourly employee, my system cannot auto-calculate the change in their vacation days etc. It would require a considerable amount of time for me to build that functionality in. However, it is possible for this situation to happen but in five years, it has only happened once. In that instance, I manually edited the records and documented the entries. So does that mean I designed the database schema poorly? No it just means I did not want to make it so rich and extensive that it can handle every remote case, just most of them.