Technological Reminiscing

[andrewducker]

Waaaay back at the dawn of time, in 1991, I was responsible for a rewrite of a dBase database used by a bunch of hospitals to keep track of treatment in the neonatal intensive care units. By judicious use of caching data in memory, very careful construction of filter statements on the fly, etc. I was able to bring down some calculations from running overnight (and taking about 9 hours to run) to only taking 20 minutes. Which was something I was insanely proud of at the time.

Ten years later I rewrote it all again, this time in Visual Foxpro. And due to the database software being much better and the hardware being an order of magnitude faster, I was able to use simple SQL and have the queries run in real time (well, up to 10 seconds for a big one). It was such a relief to throw away the code I'd hand-crafted, and a joy to get the answers back quickly. And I don't even work with databases any more - but part of me misses having to carefully fine-tune SQL to eke out every last efficiency.

Originally a response to this post on theferrett's journal.

Comments

[martling.livejournal.com]

Just work on bigger databases, and the same old hacks will all come flooding back...

[andrewducker]

Well, yeah. If I moved over to a DBA job then I'd have to start thinking about that kind of thing again. This week I'm a GUI person though, which means I don't actually directly access databases at all - it's all XML messages to the midware, where Java and SQL Stored Procs do the work. (The Stored procs are DB2 on the mainframe)

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Hmm is this a throwback to a recent chat we had when I admitted Java terrified me and you were running scared from my Unix & Oracle?

Give me my 10 million record Databases anyday. Oooo for the first time in two years we'll be working in the same building this week! Wave & come to rescue me if you see me banging my head on the desk!