Chapter 12 -- Databases Are For Dorks

Chapter 12

LAWSON DAVIES

Lawson is a TMS consultant who, on his return from five years working and walking in the Highlands of New Guinea, abandoned the stressful life of itinerant teacher, novelist, and social parasite to enter the more relaxed role of a client/server code warrior. His areas of special interest are design, real ale, system architecture, Islay malts, database connectivity, cricket, distributed systems, and the oeuvres of Brian Eno, Bach, and Gary Glitter (who is now allegedly politically incorrect). From the last book he found that mentioning what you like to drink in your biography is a fairly certain way of being offered it.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

(Wherein Sherlock Holmes is considering using Memo/Text fields in a SQL Server 6.5 database.)

Data is not interesting. Data access is not interesting. Information is interesting, data is not. But data is necessary, like deodorant on a subway train, and therefore has to be addressed. Most Visual Basic applications must, regretfully, have dealings with a database somewhere along the line. The current propaganda figure is 95 percent. This data access thing can be a dirty business, so if you have to do it, do it once, do it right, and forget it forever. This means write such a generic and reusable thing that even a gibbering Java programmer will be able to reuse it. How about a middle-tier DLL that you can use over and over again?



Ltd Mandelbrot Set International Advanced Microsoft Visual Basics 6. 0
Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic (Mps)
ISBN: 1572318937
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 168

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