Bob Hovious (2/27/2009)
I was referring to inadequacies of alleged IT professionals 😉My war story is that our development group used to have a guy whose entire job was to import data. I found this out after we went through some rightsizing and he was let go. When I reviewed his code it turned out to be slow AND inaccurate. He was driving it through a VB program with maximum RBAR. We just scrapped it all. Now things he used to run for a day are handled in under a minute, without duplications or omissions. No brilliance required, it was just a sad example of developers (who don't understand database) thinking that knowing how to do an INSERT or an UPDATE is all there is to it.
The really sad part is, some people probably thought he was doing a good job.
And, absolutely spot on... just because someone walked by a book store that sells SQL books, doesn't mean that they even know how to spell it. 😉 I pretty much blame management for "bad" SQL Developers because it's those managers that are totally clueless... For example... you've seen the "want ads"... "Wanted, Web developer. Must have x number of years experience with Java/VB/C#/flavor-of-the-month and 1 year of experience with SQL." Such a person (usually, there are those wonderful exceptions) shouldn't even be allowed near the DB except by calling stored procedures that someone else wrote. But, sure enough, they get put into the position of solving ETL and other large batch problems.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.