Getting My Passion Back

I've been quiet for a long while on this blog because I had been working for a company that just did not get databases at all, and it has been a real energy sapper dealing with the consequences of all of the wrong decisions they kept making.  I'll spare you the gory details, but the biggest problems of many were the wholesale adoption of Agile Development (Scrum) with no training, support or planned cutover coupled with the complete abandonment of any documentation, and the decision by the Technical Architect that databases were trivial and unimportant now so proper, up front database design was not needed any more. 

As you can imagine the consequences of such changes were almost catastrophic and very repetitive:-

• No one knew whether any newly developed piece of software was correct because there was no documentation at all on what it was supposed to be doing in the first place or how it should have been doing it
• Doing Agile Development with no clear end goal meant that every new Sprint was always refactoring the previous Sprint's work to add in the new but unplanned additional functionality so real productivity kept decreasing while test failure rates increased
• The resultant database was a complete mess with data all over the various tables, undocumented, with duplicated data fields within the same table, and no indexes whatsoever other than on the primary key fields
• They used Hibernate to "generate" the SQL queries, but no one knew how to make it generate "good" SQL - one search query joined the main data table to itself 5 times in the same query, and no one in the development team could explain why. 

That's progress for you!!

I've been out of there for some time now, but it left behind a distinctly bad taste about "modern software development" and databases, and put me off doing database work for some time.  Luckily though I've slowly come back round to realising that databases are the right place to store important data, and they should be designed properly and not just thrown together.  And there are still challenges to be met with good database design, and new technologies to learn and use.

Which means both that I should be starting to blog more frequently in the future, and that I'm now looking again for database related work (Oracle based, around Woking in the UK, if anyone needs a good Oracle person).