Search

There is a common "patchwork" philosophy in IT departments throughout the world that gives the idea that altering, changing, and fixing poorly designed databases is how you correct the problems - as opposed to starting from the ground-up and re-working a system.

While Relational Database Design gets thrown out the window, a terrible side effect of this patchwork idea takes hold inside of most of these organizations. Databases - whether Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL - have a tendency to be amazing thieves when poorly designed to begin with.

If you're faced with a project that's designed poorly, but could be "patched up" to do what you need to, consider the following:

Lost Time:

Making dozens of changes to a poorly designed database in order to "get what you need" out of it is time much better spent invested in fixing the design problems in the first place. Does your organization need hour upon wasted hour of tweaking and hacking apart databases when you could put together an intelligent design, and simply implement some of the same queries, forms, and reports in a new streamlined system that doesn't need to be constantly changed?

Lost Revenue:

Databases love costing you money. While a member of your department is hacking away at a database, trying to bend it to his will in order to get statistics from it that would normally be achieved simply in a properly designed relational database model, you're losing time AND money. The salary you're paying to play with something that needs fixing is money being paid to ignore a problem that's staring you straight in the face.