was founded by an Oracle dba. It was a small shop, but there was an order to what we were doing. I wrote 0 lines of SQL. My classic ASP code called stored procedures and was returned a record set or output value. The database developers kept me in line, I didn’t even know the table or column names of where my records were being written to or from, and that was fine. As a result, development went very smoothly. Testing, beyond unit testing, was almost a non-event. Data quality, was high. Conversions, were simple. Customers, were happy.
I guess I was lucky, I had taken only one course on database design in school, and this job was as close to text-book as I would ever see. But it spoiled me. Shortly after 9-11-2001, the company lost a couple major contracts and went under. I would spend years bucking the system as a punk kid, trying to explain to production managers that the source of so many of their problems was a lack of focus on a sound data architecture. I made few friends in IT. I called my fellow UI developers cowboys. The few people who would listen to me were usually…
