I first read Robyn Sands’s article on the importance of a good data model back when it was published in May.
However, the comments have since moved on and taken a life of their own – a sure sign of a great post – with some excellent points and poignant observations on the frequent neglect of the data model in the agile world.
If you’ve not read it or have not kept updated with the comments, then I urge you to.
Some people attach a lot of weight to what the Oracle documentation says.
Rightly so, most of the time. It is a hugely significant resource.
But there are some documentation bugs / errors.
I was answering a character set posting on the OTN forums and when providing some links to the doco, I noticed the quote below in the official documentation:
I think these secions that describe encoding are out of date. For example, do Java and Microsoft Windows still use UCS-2? Or do they use UTF-16? I think UNIX uses UTF-32. So I am confused about what is the most current information for these sections.
How reassuring 
Categories: 11g · Documentation · charactersets · database
Just a quick one…
Had a meeting request today to get an idea of the different authorisation groups that will be required when in the future we move to a model that carries the authorisation ACL with the data.
This is a part of an ongoing architectural initiative to turn a logic-heavy database effectively into a bit bucket.
I know these things are going on all the time everywhere in a quasi-religious battle.
I know I’ve talked about it before as have many others elsewhere.
I’m sure I resolved to let it wash over me and not to get bothered by it or get sucked into battles I can’t win.
But this is madness this aspiration that this database, probably one of the most expensive bits of this tech stack, should be reduced to a bit bucket at some point in the future.
With the middle tier doing the data joining…
The middle tier doing what should be the set operations in the database in some sort of horrific giant nested loop operation…
And the middle tier doing the data security, which should be right there with the data in the database.
It’s a mad world.
And in today’s economic climate, this can’t be what they mean by “doing more for less”.
Categories: architecture · database · oracle
