Instead of working, I blog.

I spent the week at TechED in L.A. and I had the (good?) fortune to sit in on a couple .Net sessions.  The most memorable of course, and the one that attracted me to begin with was on data access tricks.  I didn’t have a session guide with me at the time so I didn’t know it was a .Net session till I got there, but man, once i started listening i was amazed.

Ok, so the course was about data access tricks… and hearing .Net guys talk about SQL and DB access is like listening to your 5yr old explaining to your 3yr old why it rains.  It’s no wonder why there are so many poor apps out there when one of the big data access tricks is to create a view in the DB for large joins.  Now, I’m not saying that the guy suggested using a view instead of putting a large join query on the front end… no, not quite.  He was actually announcing it like it had just been created… the latest thing developed by the SQL world to get around an age old problem.  And I’ll tell you too… the ooos and aaaahs were plentiful.

Another good one was creating a view to get around all that pesky crap the DBAs make you do like solving many-to-many queries with lookup tables.  The way they were whining about that and saying what nonsense it was is incredible.  I thought about raising my hand and offering some constructive criticism on the matter, but I get enough of those conversations at home when I’m arguing with my kids about why they can’t have candy for dinner in the middle of the street.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t mind this kind of thing too much, but I think part of the problem with .Net devs being so puerile about these things is that their leaders aren’t guiding them.  Because instead of complaining about DBAs making them use lookup tables, which are necessary in many designs, he could have approached it from the professional angle of… hey you know how you have to solve a many-to-many with lookup tables and how much work that is on the front end?  Well here’s an idea, have your DBAs give you a view for that on the back end and you can just select from it in your C# code.  Now that makes .Net guys sound like professionals who know a thing or 2 about coding and about data access instead of whiney babies who are being made to go to bed early by the DBAs.

So I know I’ve said this before but it bears repeating because it keeps coming up… devs just don’t get it.  And seriously guys, if you really can’t see why your DBAs make you do the things you do, then you deserve this rant.

You take performance and concurrency pretty seriously in your apps, so why can’t you apply that to your data access as well?  So it’s time to grow up and become real adult IT folk.