Give your DB the love it deserves

Pity the poor database. As critical to most apps as a foundation to a building. And as interesting as an accounting seminar at a nudist colony.

Not sexy enough for the attentions of the senior dev, or considered to be “well understood”, DB work frequently end up getting handed off to the junior guys on the team. Who promptly make all the mistakes the senior guys have learned not to make. Mistakes which end up with massive hunks of sub-optimal compensating code in layers above them. Then they write some code off the back of them. Viola! Instant technical debt.

Queue self-perpetuating “relational databases aren’t web scale“, “normalised schemas aren’t performant”, “You don’t have these problems with NoSQL”.

Senior guys often don’t have the time to deal with it. DBAs aren’t seen as being responsive enough for JFDI/iterative development. Peer review at the end is too late.

So what’s the fix? Just enough design. Back of napkin. Whack together a schema, and talk through with someone (else) who knows what they’re doing. Then code. It’s not rocket science.