Really BB! You of all people! You can do better than that! I had assumed that you were IT-savvy. What you say suggests that you may be a DB user, but you sure as Sherridan don't talk like a DB designer, much less a systems designer. Capitalised or not? Weeeellll... maybe if the distinction is built into your software and hard to leave out. Have you considered what difference it makes to the mechanics of sorting, classification, or access? Whether you see it happen or not? For little toy kilo-record files it might be trivial, but we don't all work on those all the time. How anything is sorted? Oh boy... BB, in a certain large corporation which here shall be nameless, I got lumbered with a job of indexing the world-wide email and phone list after some other people repeatedly failed to do it. (Their software tools kept dying when fed the full files.) I wrote the application from scratch with no pain in an unfamiliar language in a few days, partly because I saw to it that a temp got hired to re-format all the names canonically. A year or two later Global HQ decreed a new, commercial-DB-based (Again no names of which large corporation's DB package it was based on!) package, and so we used that instead. Except that the savvy seniors clandestinely loaded and retained my version for years afterward because it was easier to use, more often successful in searching, and faster than the off-the-shelf even when there was a first-time hit. Canonically formatted files are VERY efficiently handleable. But you knew that BB, didn't you? How about this? A certain file-checking job involved cross-checking two files against each other. (Again, never mind which international corporation's files those were!) The job had been manual, but rapidly became infeasible as the files grew. Someone wrote a quick-and-dirty to help, but it took a week to run (5-day week, but still!) and only partly did the job. Someone (maybe the same guy; I don't remember) did the job better, and it ran in a day, still partly successfully. Someone else did a totally different job and it ran in a couple of hours, almost successfully, but it didn't work. Then to get me out of someone's hair I got the job. I began by reformatting the input file every run. Stupid, but whoever expected anything else. Run time, including the sort (Which I also had to write myself) and selection match pass: 49 seconds. Several orders of magnitude improvement in performance plus perfect results. And best of all, it didn't take a lot of sexy programming, just competent design. I probably cold have halved the times for both jobs if I had written in low level code, but it wasn't really necessary. Now BB, I reckon that when proper attention changes a job from not worth running, to so trivial that at first the user thinks that the job hadn't run, it is not a "minute detail, which makes very little difference at all", but a very important detail, which makes enough difference to get management respect -- till the next toughie comes along! You see BB, 'who cares how "van holst" is sorted? --a search for "holst" is gonna find it no matter what you do' is exactly the sort of detail that made the difference in the real life cases. Would you believe, BB, that I could go on for some time in this vain vein? My Gordian (Note the Caps BB!) gnot was nicely productive once I kut it with proper knit-picking design (as in untangling rather than depediculotic activity). Not a louse-egg of "full paralysis" in sight, or in anyone's hair! It is not a matter of bottom-up vs top-down; it is knowing when and why which is appropriate. Cheers, Jon
and we see yet another excellent example of how the "metadata" b.s. is such an unproductive path.
the o.c.d. people love to focus on these minute details, which make very little difference at all -- who cares how "van holst" is sorted?, or if the "van" is capitalized or not?, or indeed whether it is "capitalised" or not?, because a search for "holst" is gonna find it no matter what you do -- and, as if this insignificance wasn't bad enough, such compulsiveness usually causes full paralysis.
you can tie yourself up worrying about that crap... or you can cut the gordian knot and be productive.
-bowerbird
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