“I Don’t Even Know What a Database Is”

Posted by jakeo on July 21, 2009

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I heard this quote from a programmer once. Seriously.

Matt Mullenweg summed it up best from Structure 09:

We live in Jeff Bezos’ Amazonian republic. Every engineer is also a DBA. If you don’t understand how the database works, you shouldn’t be programming. You shouldn’t touch a keyboard.

Word up.

–jake

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  1. jakeo Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:10:15 PDT

    Maybe more appalling is that there is a book for using Excel as Your Database.

    MSPAINT.EXE As Your Database

  2. Heatboy Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:37:30 PDT

    DR. SBAITSO BUILT MY DATABASE

  3. Jon B Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:38:06 PDT

    While I can’t concur with Matt completely (some engineers don’t interact with the database), I hear what he’s saying. At the core of all applications lies the data. Ignoring it’s structure is fine until a few thousand (or million) of people want to access and update it concurrently.

    And as far as Excel is concerned, I have to disagree. A spreadsheet is the fundamental building block of a database. A table with column and rows. If you can get your head around that, you can get your head round a database. Maybe :-)

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