Today we have a guest editorial from Grant Fritchey as Steve is out of town.
This has been an interesting year for elections. Between the Brexit vote and the US Presidential election, emotions around votes and voting seem to be running quite high. I don’t want to get into the politics of either of these votes. Stay or go, Trump or Clinton, there are choices that we make all the time. Same thing goes for the choices we make regarding technology. I read a very interesting article about voting that suggests there’s a lot more emotion tied to that decision than many of us are willing to admit. Not only did it lead me to reexamine my own choices, but it got me thinking, how much emotion is tied up in our technical decision making?
Technical choices are just down to 1s and 0s, right? Emotion doesn’t enter into it… Ha! OK. Let’s try this little thought experiment:
You are a DBA. Your development team has just stated that they’re going to build the next application using an Object/Relational Mapping tool.
How many of you are actual DBAs and you just felt your blood pressure spike or your heart race a little. Think emotion isn’t going to enter into your decision making process? It absolutely will. Are there very successful, well-functioning systems, out there based on ORM tools? Yes. Have there also been train wrecks based on these tools? Yes.
The question isn’t whether or not ORMs, or any other technology (have you moved some of your databases to the cloud?), is inherently evil. The question is, can this technology be applied, appropriately, within the problem space we’re facing. To answer that question, and answer it well, you must divorce yourself from the emotion of the situation. You will have to look at both sides of the equation. Does an ORM tool make database management more difficult? Yeah, it can. Does an ORM tool make coding easier and faster. Yes. Now we have to arrive at a balance point. Are there tools and techniques we can use that will enable us to take advantage of the positive aspects of the ORM tool while still ensuring good database management? Yes. It just takes a little extra effort and research, both on the part of the DBA and on the part of the development team.
The emotional baggage we tie to technology leads us to poor choices. I’ve been around a while. I remember when a DBA said to me: “There is no way we will ever host databases on a virtual machine.” Who believes such a statement now? That was an emotional decision. I was once told: “Azure SQL Database is never going to be fast enough to support average database work loads.” Yet, I now have a couple of friends who are putting more databases into Azure SQL Database because, and I quote, “it’s a lot easier to get good performance.”
I’m not about to question your voting decisions. However, let’s examine, and reexamine, our decisions regarding technology. Are we opposed to TechX because it’s fundamentally flawed? Or, are we instead opposed to TechX because of a past bad experience, or we saw someone make fun of it online, or our favorite presenter/blogger said it was stupid, or we’re just resisting change? Let’s try to take the emotion out of technical decisions so that we can better support our respective businesses.
