On Production "Agile" Databases

time to read 1 min | 173 words

In most cases, the database is the heart and soul of the application. Every database book or class will be sure to mention that most databases outlast the application that created it.

This usually cause to organization to threat a database as a fragile thing that need nurturing and three levels of approval (including from the Janitor's Sister, who once read a book about building data driven application in VB 3.0) before the smallest change can go into the database. It's worse when it is a production database. I don't think that I would've liked wprking in such a place.

And then there is the other extreme. The production database is a free-for-all bring-all-your-friends and let's-decorate-this-place-because-it-looks-boring. Common signs for such a database is prolification of tables with names that contains OLD, TEMP, TMP, FOO, etc. It makes working with the database interesting.

Out of the two extremes, I would choose the first one in a nine out of ten cases.