Thanks for your comments.  First let me say that I appreciate your site, your editorials and the tremendous resource that SQL Server Central provides.  I use it daily, and I really appreciate you.

I also want to apologize for my self-righteous tone.  I'm usually a bit more diplomatic, but this is an issue I feel strongly about.

I can't control governments, courts or the insurance community.  Nor can I control unreasonable expectations of my customers with regard to issues of timing (for example, expecting a 12 month product to be delivered in 12 days). 

However, like all developers and DBAs, I can control the quality of my own deliverables, and I am not sympathetic to the "all software has bugs" take on things.  A co-worker once told me that database relationships are "textbook" stuff, not “real world”.  Another co-worker tried to make the case that source control is needless bureaucracy.  A 3rd party component I recently purchased for $500 only worked after three days of trial and error because their support documentation didn't bother to mention a couple of necessary "workarounds".  A colleague told me just today that normalizing his table to 3NF (41 fields) was unnecessary (1 table normalized to 15).  And, last week, I had to uninstall and reinstall SQL Server 2000 (Enterprise edition) to get Full-Text Search installed (it was not installed during the initial installation and I could not get it to install during a customized install). 

You are correct that delivering bug free software for business applications is unrealistic.  But I believe that the primary reason is not because of the complexity of our work, but because of the fact that many (if not most) in the development community have seriously low standards for quality with apologists to defend them.  In my view, that’s not acceptable.  Not from MS, not from Oracle and not from me.  I honestly believe that we software/database developers can do better ... much better.

Yes ... bug free.  I'm very serious.  NASA software engineers' deliverables must be bug free when used in the space shuttle.  Software used by air traffic controllers better be bug free before the end users put it to use.  Electronic voting machines ought to be bug free before November.  Am I being unrealistic here?  Lives and democracy don't depend on my deliverables, but then again, my products are not nearly as complex as the space shuttle. 

Thanks for listening and letting me vent.