Craig S. Mullins : The Great Excuse

Have you visited the previous topic on " Top 10 things to do before you visit the DBA " ? As a DBA, have you come across any excuses from your application developer on accomplishing a particular task ? Find out if you remember any of these excuses pointed by Craig or feel free to add your own if you feel he has missed out any.

Check out this post about – ” Top Ten Application Programmer Excuses ” by Craig S. Mullins, President & Principal Consultant @ Mullins Consulting, Inc

This blog post clearly justifies Craig’s findings, with no hard feelings to the application developer reading it :

1 ) Application Developer : ” There is something wrong with the database “
This problem cannot be solved - Let's blame database, shall we ?. I am sure all the databases around the world would agree with Craig and support him on that.

2) Application Developer : ” But I copied that from another program“
I am not sure how I got this error, I copied it from another program which works fine, why not this - DBA ?? We don't even know what you copied.

3) Application Developer : ” It worked yesterday “
I am not sure what happened, it worked fine yesterday. I am still thinking why it didn't work today.

4) Application Developer : ” Isn't there something that you can make it to work "
-STA DB(DB1) SPACE(SP1) ACCESS(FORCE) is not the remedy to solutions all the time.

5) Application Developer : ” But I can do that better in C, JAVA etc “
Let's escape from COBOL - for now.

6) Application Developer : ” It works that way in Oracle, Access, SQL Server etc “
Let's escape from XZY ( the current database ) - for now.

7) Application Developer : ” It's too late in the project to re-write that “
Changing the query from SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COL1 <=10 AND COL1 >=100 to SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COL1 BETWEEN 10 AND 100 - Too late to change that.

8) Application Developer : ”But I heard somewhere it works this way“
That somewhere is nowhere most of the times. Even if that somewhere exists, it would not fit in the context.

9) Application Developer : ” Why do I have to BIND/COMPILE all the time ? “
I am sure that this is the most common discussion between developers and DBA's - BIND and COMPILE are responsibilities of a application developer and not DBA's. We are there to help you guys on any errors while performing BIND's.

10) Application Developer: ” The database system is a hog “
Not a good place to be during application releases if you are a database.

Summary :

This blog sincerely thanks Craig S. Mullins for pointing out the top ten excuses DBA's hear all the time and letting me express thoughts on such a lovely topic. We sincierly hope you as an application developer or as a DBA burst out into tears after reading this post.