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Great Art != Great Databases
By Eric Gross | August 29, 2007
A great piece of art has many characteristics, including uniqueness. Great works created of ceramic tiles have many different shapes and colors with pieces fitting together perfectly, as per required by the design. Some tiles may be cut into odd shapes while others are positioned on an angle or placed inside other sections. It is up to the artist to create a work that speaks to people, conveying whatever emotions are desired. A master is able to come up with combinations that have never been seen before and each work is different.
On the other hand, technical masterpieces are created by designing a pattern that is implemented time after time, with deviations being the exception rather then the essence of the goal. Continuing the artist analogy, a technical masterpiece would appear to be a plain wall with a repeating pattern over and over again - luckily success here is measured by the amount of work required to create the wall of tiles, replace tiles in place, and then add new tiles around existing tiles. Think about each tile as a component in your database management framework. Examples of what each tile represents: a database, a listener, a CRS node configuration, or an OS configuration. You can imagine a tile piece consisting of one of each of these tiles. If an organization with no standardization has 100 environments, you would see that each set looks different from one another - each looking totally unique from the others if there is a complete lack of consistency. The most complicated might even look like a masterpiece - that’s the one you want to keep at the distance of a 10-foot pole. When each of the pieces of art differ, you need to learn all about each piece before you can work on them. This time sink must be realized before you can be productive on any particular task and to the degree that each tile differs from the others, this can be a show-stopper.
Each being created manually through interactive steps, it is very difficult to create consistent tile structures. What is needed is a tile-building machine that can churn out tile structures, one exactly like the next, until the cows come home. This makes the creation of the tile art a painless process; so too becomes the management of these entities. All one needs to understand is the specifications to create new ones, change existing ones, and tear down environments.
Topics: Changing State, Consistency, Repeatability, Simplicity