Oracle Discoverer - help people write ugly code :)

There's been a discussion going on among some of my friends about all this horrible-looking (and often badly performing) auto-generated SQL coming out of Discoverer and other tools. Here are some of the comments made during the discussion, and some of my memories of how I got started with Oracle with the help of my good friend Mogens Egan...

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Me:

"Oracle Discoverer - helping developers write ugly code for more than a decade."

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NN:

"no no no!

the real beauty of discoverer (and similar tools) is not that it lets developers write ugly code, but it lets people who don't know what code is (business users), write code and share it with other users who also don't know what code is. It's entire purpose in life is to let people who don't know what they are doing, do it. developers do what they do with some understanding and can, sometimes, be educated. accountants and hr people can't."

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Me:

"This brings me back. From 1987 to 1990 I was in a bank, sharing an office with Mogens Egan (the father of Morten Egan) and basically creating a datawarehouse (although we didn't know it) for internal users in the bank.

Our strategy was this:

1. Every night (or once a week or whatever) we would transfer data from the banks mainframe system via a SNA gateway to our VAX. The data came from IMS databases and was delivered as flat ASCII files (one physical record = one logical record) which often resultet in very very long records, of course, since IMS is hierachical. We would then load it into tables and let the users access it.

2. I would hold one- or two-day courses where I'd teach the attendees (who had probably only used a PC for a very short time) how to log onto the VAX using Smarterm, how to use VMS basic commands (including the editor), how to use SQL and SQL*Plus, how to create default forms in Forms 2.3 - and some other stuff.

3. Mogens Egan's idea was that it was better to turn users/experts (SME's in todays jargon) into "programmers" than vice versa. And then it should be our job to fix run-away jobs (read: SQL that performed bad or messed up things for others).

A rather anarchistic approach, you could say. But man, it worked. In three years we had 1000 users, some of who turned out to be natural super users, who started creating systems that helped their co-workers.

Since they were not officially named super users they couldn't demand to be given time to develop something they thought could be useful - they were by natural selection only allowed to spend time on something their co-workers thought useful.

Mogens and I are still in contact with many of those users. The machine is now an Alpha cluster, the data it manages runs a rather large banks' trading stuff, and all that - but its name is still Samson. And the super user we created back then is still called Supermule, which is the Danish name for Super Goof. With the introduction of English-speaking consultants in the last 10 years it has proved a minor mistake - they all ask "What's a super mule?"

So yes, we had many incidents of run-away jobs where the poor user had issued a SQL statement without the proper where-clause, etc. But then we would discover it, kill it, help the user - and all of the victims of this bad SQL knew it could be their turn one day, so they didn't get mad or upset.

That playground which we created back then generated a lot of Oracle-lovers who are still around in various higher positions, and perhaps it would have been even easier for them back then if we had had Discoverer.

So I think you're absolutely right: Discoverer will help computer-illeterates write really bad code even faster. But at least it gets them to use Oracle, and it creates wonderful problems that finances our fantastic lifestyles.

Mogens

PS: In the World as a whole, I think Discoverer had a presence (penetration) of about 2% of customers. In Denmark it was 20% due to my ex-wife Laila (Nathalie's mother), then product sales rep for Discoverer, who insisted that every single customer should have this product, like it or not. And notice how well Miracle is doing here. Perhaps there's a relationship."

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