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If your product manager asked you to make a printer-friendly version of a webpage, how would you choose to implement it?
(A) Add a "print" parameter to your query string. In your CGI code, add IF statements where appropriate.
(B) Add a @media print section to the stylesheet.
(C) Write a 200-line Javascript function to walk through the DOM tree to remove unwanted navigational elements.
No points for guessing which choice was made by the previous maintainer of one of the web apps I'm working on now.
modified on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 8:07 PM
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(D) Say, if you want it to print nice, don't use a webpage. Or maybe that's just me.
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Let me guess, he picked (C) 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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and he wrote a buggy code to jeopardize the system and crash the user's browser to be appreciated by the management and promoted as a 'Technical Manager'.  
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar
Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts... --William Shakespeare
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Not just that, but perhaps the users would turn off javascripting on their browsers 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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Good guess.
I showed him how to do (B) today, and he was impressed at how much simpler it was.
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ClementsDan wrote: I showed him how to do (B) today, and he was impressed at how much simpler it was.
Cool. Hopefully, he learned from your example 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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And. You should know by now that macho-programmers don't take the easy route when you can write hundreds of lines of redundant code. It's a system or developing known as Advanced Redundant System Enhanced Helping Online Lexical Expressions.
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You mean A.R.S.E.H.O.L.E., right? 
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No primary key or index on every table.
No view, No stored procedure, No trigger.
 I'm not sure whether it even fit for 1st Norm.
This database is used by our company's previous accounting system. I've heard a colleague told me that they have to restart the system once (or more) per day.
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Sounds like a third-party product we used to use. I suspect that the application read everything into memory and then just worked with it there. 
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Sounds like SAP to me. Have you seen the database? Talk about a coding WTF....
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I once had to work with a database like that. It was just a huge number of tables, as described, but with the added bonus of *no* foreign key relationships. Evidently, all foreign keys and referential integrity was handled by the application.
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There are still people who argue that there should be no referential integrity on production databases.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: There are still people who argue that there should be no referential integrity on production databases
That tends to be my preference, I prefer to code the referential integrity through the application code rather than embed it in the database.
I won't give the reasons why this can be a very good idea as there will be plenty of counter reasons as to why it is a very bad idea. 
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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No referential integrity sometime acceptable.
But if you don't have key or index on every table, it will slow down query significantly. (For some complicated join query, it will be 10 to 100 times slower than the one with indexes).
 Can you imagine you have to wait 20 minutes only to print a invoice? (And during this time, all the other people almost can't do anything)
If you design database like this, I would really hope I'll never cooperate with you.
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Indexes - pwah!
Real men use table scans in their queries - indexes are for cheats
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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I have actually created databases using this model and while FKs are great they should not be used to test the integrity of the data. Wait till you see an app where the developer attempts to save a record and traps the FK exception. Talk about programming by error!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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A good excuse I heard for that nonsense is that " That is good for preformance" !!
RTFM = Read the F***ing manual.
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cartergu wrote: No primary key or index on every table.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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I was talking with small db admin turned to MBA describing data-warehouse on those terms
Yusuf
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I just started at a new place and came on to to help with their database and application stuff. I knew it was bad as soon as I saw their databases. For example they have an article table and a column called ArticleTopics which has "23,5,45,78,23,.." they where pulling it into the app normalizing it and getting all topics which of course had TopicCategories "34,56,..." and such. Not a join could be done in the whole database.
I normalized the database using SSIS script component and rewrote the app from coldfusion to ASP.
Finally I submit a request to shut down the old system do one last pull of the data in SSIS and register the new app with the domain and this admin comes to my office screaming that I should never use foreign keys and all normalization should be done in the app because they cause performance problems and that asp is crap, I should use dhtml. I couldn't believe it when my boss told me I need to rewrite it. I lost it.
Anyway anyone need a good DBA/OLAP Designer?
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I've worked at places where they believed that the database should do as little of the work as possible too. 
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I've worked at places where they believed that the database should do as little of the work as possible too.
Yip, me too, funny the DBA agreed with the issues, but said there was not enough time to do all the 'optimizations'. He had been working a good few years on that DB...
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"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"
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