Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database" - Mailing list pgsql-general
| From | John McKown |
|---|---|
| Subject | Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database" |
| Date | |
| Msg-id | CAAJSdjiOssafQDD0Af37C+GFaJ3BVPSrss8=3FPTFN+J+1wLHA@mail.gmail.com Whole thread Raw |
| In response to | Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database" (Pierre Chevalier Géologue <pierrechevaliergeol@free.fr>) |
| Responses |
Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database"
Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database" |
| List | pgsql-general |
Le 04/05/2016 15:25, John McKown a écrit :On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Geoff Winkless <pgsqladmin@geoff.dj
<mailto:pgsqladmin@geoff.dj>>wrote:
<snip>
The sensible way is to do it as John wrote - to restrict access rights
to everyone except admin to calling functions only. That way the
functions are written by the people who are paid to understand the
business rules and the data behind it, and the application developers
can ask those experts to do the heavy lifting for them. Having to
persuade management that they should no longer be able to connect the
database to MS Access and make changes that way will usually put an
end to that pure model, though. :)
Allowing PHBs direct access to company data is a nasty thing.
Sorry, what is a PHB? Our friend google didn't help me much on this matter.
Ah. Sorry. PHB is a "Pointy Haired Boss" and is a reference to the comic "Dilbert". Dilbert is a engineer who works for a boss who is a complete idiot & has his hair moussed up at the sides (I guess it is moussed).
They become like some users who "know Excel". They are now just as
knowledgeable as someone who's been doing this for years. I've actually
heard one say something akin to: "Damn it, I can write Excel formulas. I
know very well that an new function on the web site could be written in
less than a day, if you'd just get off you a$$ and do it."
Hm. Sounds familiar...
I usually call "excelitis" a sort of mental disease related to a use and abuse of Excel, up to the point where one cannot imagine data which is *not* in a table-like array. And they think that they do Relational Database Management... In the 1990's, I met many-many deeply sick persons. I had been infected for a while, I must confess.
Yes, I keep reading in another forum about how to interface the R language so that the users can continue to input data into Excel, but then have it run a R language script to produce some output. So many there are trying to use Excel as their "user interface" because it is just about all the user knows. I had a manager, long ago, who used a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to contain all his memos. I was glassy eyed in disbelief. He also would use his hand calculator to add up the numbers in the spreadsheet to be sure that the summation function in the spreadsheet didn't make a mistake. <shudder/>
À+
Pierre
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.
Maranatha! <><
John McKown
John McKown
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