Last week Andy Warren wrote a great article called revisiting what you know and it got quite a few interesting comments. The gist of the article is that many of us learn certain tenets and techniques because we have to, just in order for us to get a job done. We're focusing on being effective and not necessarily on doing something in the best way. So Andy's advice was that we should periodically revisit the things we believe in and see if the way we are doing things makes sense or if we should consider doing things differently.

In many ways I agree. I used to tell all junior DBAs working for me that no cursors or temp tables were allowed. It was an iron rule for them to work within in the SQL Server v6.5 days and they needed to abide by it. Then one of them saw me using a cursor to perform some administrative update and asked me why.

My answer was that it was a one time thing, the cursor worked and was quick and easy to develop, and it made the best solution. Of course I got queried as to why they couldn't write cursors in code that went into our products. My answer was that most of their code was run over and over and needed to be efficient. In general, cursors and temp tables weren't efficient and if there was another way around, we needed to code it that way.

They were skeptical, but they learned that I wasn't being hypocritical because over the next few months we had a few places where they were stumped with certain problems. We agreed a temp table solved some of them, and decided to implement it. I told them the rule still hadn't changed, and no temp tables would be allowed in other code. We could make exceptions, but it shouldn't be a tool on one of the lower shelves. This one should be a bit higher up, require the stepladder kept in my office, them to ask permission, etc.

I think that we should be effective in our jobs. Getting things done in a timely fashion is the most important thing, but we should also strive for some level of craftsmanship in our code as well. Throwing something together is sometimes necessary, but we can throw something together that has some stability. Something that is able to handle some stress or even just make a refactor easier at a later date. Or we can throw something together that wobbles like a child's bike assembled without wrenches.

Which would you prefer?

This editorial was originally published on Aug 5, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is away on the SQL in the City US 2012 tour.