The Charles Schultz Philosophy

The following is a philosophy of life attributed to Charles Schulz, the creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip. You don't have to actually answer the questions to get the point. Just ponder on them.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America pageant.
4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.
6. Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners.



How did you do? The point is, few of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.



Here's another set of questions. See how you do with these:

1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.
2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.
3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.
4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.
5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.



Easier?

The lesson:
The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials...the most money...or the most awards. They simply are the ones who care the most.



For me, I thought this was something good to ponder on the weekend before Thanksgiving. I realized how easy it was for me to answer the second set of questions and how many people have touched my life. There have been family, friends, teachers, mentors, and colleagues who have given me something of themselves. I feel very, very thankful and my life is richer.

So, what are you thankful for?

One last hurrah on database independence

I had mentioned in my previous post on database independence about Toon Koppelaars presentation on a database centric approach to application development. I contacted him and he said he was going to post his presentation on his site soon. But in the meantime, I thought I'd show one of his slides which I think speaks volumes to the performance aspects of trying to keep with a database independent approach.



The slide shows:
a) If you put business logic in the mid tier, you’ll call the dbms an order of magnitude more.
b) If you also put data logic in the mid tier, you’ll call the dbms two orders of magnitude more.
c) Finally, if you also don’t use SQL effectively, you’ll call the dbms three orders of magnitudes more.

So, a single click on a "Save" button by the user can ultimately mean 100 calls the dbms has to execute to handle all the middle tier madness!

You should be able to download Toon's full presentation from RuleGen.com very soon. Give it a look...it's good stuff.

Database Independence?!

OK. Call me dense. Call me biased. Call me performance conscious. But I just can't groove on the concept of database independence. You know what I mean? The whole idea of having all your application logic built into your application and the database does basically nothing...well, it just doesn't make sense. Even after hearing all the arguments, I just don't get it.

There are so many optimizations that can't be utilized when the database isn't involved. The database ends up serving back boatloads of "simple" query results (usually max of 2-3 tables per query and mostly single table queries) and the application does everything else. The application basically processes the joins, applies the constraints...everything. What would amount to simple work that could occur in minimal time for Oracle, amounts to seconds of time processing the data at the application layer. Heck...if you're gonna do that, why not just have flat files to store your data and skip the database all together!? It'd sure save you a bundle on Oracle license fees!

Toon Koppelaars recently delivered a presentation at Miracle Oracle Open World that I attended that was about a database centric approach. I hope he'll post it somewhere soon for "public consumption" as it makes an extremely strong argument for going towards a "fat" database and getting the bulk of logic and function out of the application layer. Amen brother!

I'm ranting, so I'll stop. But, I'd love to hear from you about your thoughts. I'm an open-minded kinda gal, but when it comes down to it, I find all the reasons people share with me about why they absolutely have to write database independent code and put all the code in their application layer to be just a bunch of excuses. They are excuses that cover up 1) lack of sufficient knowledge of the databases they want to use and 2) a preference for what they think is easy. I mean, when you have a stable full of developers who can code Java fast and furious, but have been taught to not care about the database, designing for a database centric approach just isn't the forte...so it doesn't happen. But, when performance problems start to occur, they want to blame the database. Again...I just don't get it.

Can anyone help me out here?

Recent Presentations

I've posted my most recent presentations from Miracle Oracle Open World in Denmark and the OPP2008 (Oracle PL/SQL Programming Conference) in Chicago to SlideShare. By the way, SlideShare is pretty cool if you've never seen or used it. It's a great way to easily share presentations. You can also add audio to create SlideCasts. I'm thinking of adding an audio track over the presentations I've already uploaded, but that'll have to wait until I have more time to do so. So much to do...so little time!

I've also added a link to my blog sidebar that will access all my presentations I upload to SlideShare. So, after this post ages off my main blog page, it'll be easy to find them from the sidebar link. I plan to post all my presentations there after I've delivered them.

To access the presentation you want, just choose the name of the presentation on the right side and it will display in the view area on the left. Happy viewing!

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