After it was raised to me by another member, I decided that we should come here and let us apply the Miller Test I know porn when I see it on this bit of question: How to dive into an ugly database?
Hey
I'm sure many of you are/were dealing with a ugly database. You know, that database that isn't normalized at all, that database where you have to do a large painfully query to get the most trivial data, that database that is in production and you can't change a bit... you know, "that one".
My question is, how do you deal with it?
- Do you try to make a new database?
- You give up and leave it alone? What
- advice can you give?
I should imagine we can all agree that this is a highly subjective question. But it's just the sort of thing that nobody ever finds in peer-review journals. It's just the sort of question that everybody else always wants to know. Those days when you're grumbling and kicking the board under your desk and squeezing your stressball and going "if the arseholes who built this daisy-forsaken database knew the first thing about frogjumping database design, I might enjoy this part of my day better" (cleaned up the language for the ... well for everybody)
So the question has become: Even tho this is subjective and should be closed as such, do you think it fosters the sort of discussion that would be acceptable on this site from time to time? All forums suffer this great debate. SO ended up with P.SE and even then there's plenty of questions that get closed routinely on both sites that are subjective.
There's also precedent of it getting a little too out of hand and SOIS stomping down on the community and snubbing out these questions when they got too frivolous.
So as a community, what do we think for this site?