Lightwave
Ad astra
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- Sep 27, 2004
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The Design Process - 2 steps forward 1 back
I'm curious I've been designing relatively basic databases mainly for my own purposes for about 5 years now - (I've actually been doing it for longer than that but I don't rate anything I've made before then enough to consider it as useful).
Most of the better ones I've totally re-designed from the ground up at least once.
Seems to me that good database design is particularly incremental and there's a significant amount of intuitive subjective design to many parts of it particularly layout. So in that respect about 50% of good design often comes from the refinement of the thing once up and running. This is relativley large percentage and an indication of just how wide of the mark I can be when setting out on a project.
I've hit a few hurdles in a few databases which have been major and really required complete re-design. Fine enough when its myself setting out the design criteria I've got no one to blame except myself but this is even more likely when others design the spec.
In particular I designed a timing application for a friend. It takes times from radio frequency identifiers and calculates times over a variety of courses. It was heavily stressed to me at the time that they needed to have a facility to calculate Last Seen times (technical facility to have the ability to calculate times based on the last recorded time on a mat, mats picking up multiple times when people go across them) Although not hard it doubled the coding. Needless to say the client has never used the facility!!!!! I'm inclined to go back and design a simpler system and completely ignore that spec! As I do find it annoying that there's all this code just bloating the thing.
I'm curious to get others opinion but
Is everyone in here able to make great applications from the off or have you frequently started out and gone back and to a certain extent started again?
or
In your major applications do you have plans to go back and do a complete re-build from the ground up..???
I'm curious I've been designing relatively basic databases mainly for my own purposes for about 5 years now - (I've actually been doing it for longer than that but I don't rate anything I've made before then enough to consider it as useful).
Most of the better ones I've totally re-designed from the ground up at least once.
Seems to me that good database design is particularly incremental and there's a significant amount of intuitive subjective design to many parts of it particularly layout. So in that respect about 50% of good design often comes from the refinement of the thing once up and running. This is relativley large percentage and an indication of just how wide of the mark I can be when setting out on a project.
I've hit a few hurdles in a few databases which have been major and really required complete re-design. Fine enough when its myself setting out the design criteria I've got no one to blame except myself but this is even more likely when others design the spec.
In particular I designed a timing application for a friend. It takes times from radio frequency identifiers and calculates times over a variety of courses. It was heavily stressed to me at the time that they needed to have a facility to calculate Last Seen times (technical facility to have the ability to calculate times based on the last recorded time on a mat, mats picking up multiple times when people go across them) Although not hard it doubled the coding. Needless to say the client has never used the facility!!!!! I'm inclined to go back and design a simpler system and completely ignore that spec! As I do find it annoying that there's all this code just bloating the thing.
I'm curious to get others opinion but
Is everyone in here able to make great applications from the off or have you frequently started out and gone back and to a certain extent started again?
or
In your major applications do you have plans to go back and do a complete re-build from the ground up..???
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