NYCPHP Meetup

[Jim Hendricks]

Sounds to me you have the perfect situation to make lots of money!

While it may be a real PITN to work with data that horribly structured, it
does mean that everything you do will take 3-4 times as long to write and
will be very prone to bugs.  Any time I have a client force me into a poor
design decision, I document the hell out of it so that every time the client
complains how long it takes me to do XY & Z, or how many anomolies are in
the program, I gently remind them that if they had agreed to proper design
from the start they would get faster development times, better performing
applications, and relatively bug free code.  When a client hears that
message enough times in answer to their complaints, they either stop
complaining, stop development, or take it in the wallet and go for a
redesign so that the wallet doesn't hurt so much in the future.

It's sort of like I used to love working with Oracle databases because they
were so complicated and poorly documented.  It's not that I loved the work
so much as I loved getting the money caused by Oracles complexity!

Jim
______________________________________________________________
Jim Hendricks, President, Biz Computing, Inc
Phone:  (201) 599-9380     Email: jim at bizcomputinginc.com
Web: www.bizcomputinginc.com
Snail:  Jim Hendricks,  Biz Computing, Inc.,  255 McKinley Ave, New Milford,
NJ 07646
______________________________________________________________

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff" <jsiegel1 at optonline.net>
To: "NYPHP Talk" <talk at nyphp.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 8:34 PM
Subject: RE: [nycphp-talk] MySQL and spaces in data


> I had originally intended to do that, that is, normalize the data. The
> idea was "killed" a long time ago by the client.
>
> Let me make matters worse, so to speak. This data has a part code that
> represents each different car part, e.g., brakes; fender, etc. However,
> the company that creates the data (*not* my client) decided to use the
> same exact part code number for different parts so that every electronic
> module in a car has the part code "591" even though one module may
> control air bags and one may control ignition, etc. Further, part
> dealers know the parts by these 3 digit codes and can differentiate them
> by their description (ignition; air bag, etc.). So it requires a part
> code and text description to differentiate an air bag control module for
> a Buick from one from a Chevy, etc.  Even the make/model information
> that is provided is not complete....for example, some parts are lumped
> in under Mercedes Benz even though there are many different models of
> Mercedes.
>
> The bottom line is that the data is not pretty.
>
> Jeff
>