Code reuse, cursors and NIH, oh my!

time to read 1 min | 113 words

I recently discovered that a certain class of programmers has a really bad case of Not Invented here. It got so bad that they decided to implement JOIN and GROUP BY by using cursors. Of course, due to the nature of the problem, they were so excited by their new discovery that they immediately rushed to propogate it thorughout the code base, using none else than the tried and true method of copy-paste-change-one-charater-and-then-move-on-never-looking-back.

I won't speak of the performance of this method, but I think that you can guess that there are orders of magnitude difference between this new way of dealing with the database and the standard method of operation in the industry.