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It's makes me cry

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I got home today and sat down to read my home email list. Nothing new. But on a MySQL mailing list, there was an enquiry why performance was slowing in a given application. I didn’t even have to read the situation, nor the problem, it took less then the 200ms mentioned to identify the problem looking at the supplied schema.

In summary, the first table in the schema had a primary key of VARBINARY(255) and a engine type of Innodb. Hold on, wait, it’s a concatenated key of two VARBINARY(255) columns. And I should mention, that primary key was a foreign key in the next table. If this was a home website app with one user, ok well it’s still bad, but this application was having performance problems with reasonable volumes of transactions, it’s not a beginner application. (A recent reference If you don’t know your data, you don’t know your application). Where do people learn this from!

Now I want to work on a large scale out MySQL environment, an organisation or site that’s going places, but the world of even normal every day applications is littered with these basic fundamental design errors. It’s make me cry.

My last contract had many flaws across the business, and the Java code for production applications was just as bad. Check out things like What constitutes a good error message to the user?, Why IT professionals get a bad name (I could easily write one of these a day for a long time, or you could check out The Daily WFT). You think the new contract with an large existing multinational company and world-wide installed Java application I could get an improvement. I’ll leave these stories for another time. I don’t want to have to deal with this.

I’ve got 16 half written blogs on cool MySQL features or interesting topics, but I never seem to get the motivation at the end of the day. I just want to know, how do people in IT get away with this. Where is the Pride in people’s work, where is the desire for people to make what they do a better place. Where is:

An opportunity that’s a challenge, including involving hard work and tight time frames, but a job that provides the rewards of job satisfaction for a productive contribution. An importance on quality, emphasis on continued improvement, and goals of simplicity in complex situations while working in a team environment are also necessary.

Comments

  1. says

    …the first table in the schema had a primary key of VARBINARY(255) and a engine type of Innodb. Hold on, wait, it’s a concatenated key of two VARBINARY(255) columns.

    Ye Gods, that’s just… um, I think to call it horrid would be an insult to the word “horrid”.

    Now you why I wrote my book (and — despite its flaws — perhaps why there seems to be demand for a second edition). This might just have to be one of the “Don’t Do This” examples for it, too.