Sometimes it's not alll about SQL/NoSQL

Six Thoughts on the NoSQL Movement

I think the specialized database has gotten short-shrift.  Sometimes it is faster to have a database built around a certain domain than trying to do everything.

Database Normalization is a Communist Plot!

One fine day, upper management decided to re-organize us, the outsourcing team, to better align with our core client's organization.  We went from groups defined by specialities to groups defined by the department in the client company we "faced".  Thus we inherited a bunch of web applications under our care.

Business Processes 1NF — The Sacred & Holy Book of the Process

I

n a mythical business in a far away land, there was a holy book called The Business Process Manual. It was written by a very, very senior Scholar with years of deep training and experience across many businesses. The vassals and peasants all had to obey The Process, but to them, it was nothing but hardship and not meaningful to their daily lives. They begged the Scholar the change The Process: to allow them to plant earlier, or to use new crops like the potato, but the Scholar huffed and puffed and said, “No such thing has ever entered the business models I learned in school, so no such thing shall be allowed in my kingdom!” And even the King was cowed.

Business Process 0NF - Process? We don't need no steeenking process!

People piss me the hell off. I go into the first meeting to discuss a new "feature" with the users, and it usually starts off like this: "I would like you to add two fields here, and change this form so when you click this button, it does that."

This pisses me off. Big time!

Why? Because I said this was the first meeting to discuss the "feature". I haven't even been told what the requirements were, and already, the users are presenting me with a design. They're just thinking in terms of hacking the existing application to do what they want; they don't think about if it makes sense in the application or if it will break other systems that depend on this one.

10 years later, we end up with a Frankenstein's Monster of an application that does a lot of one-off things that one user asked for 5 years ago, but left the department 2-years ago and no one has touched it since. Why does this happen?

It's because the users don't know how to manage their company's business processes, and in fact, they probably don't even really know what they are.