Developers

Just a small Sunday night anecdote with a wider point. I, or maybe a colleague, recently received an update statement from a developer. Now, this developer is long of tooth and is well versed in the ways of Oracle data manipulation.

The aforementioned update statement contained an interesting hint. BYPASS_UJVC. You may not have heard of this hint. It’s not commonly used, although it’s been around since Oracle 8.1.5. Mainly because it is both undocumented and unsupported by Oracle. In the right hands, it’s a very neat way around a problem of doing an update through a join where you would otherwise be restricted by the potential of having transient keys (i.e. multiple updates via the join giving random results). There’s a bunch of other blogs around about how/why/not to use it so I won’t waffle on here.

However, the Dev was disappointed when we [the DBA’s] told him to, erm, rewrite his code (probably as a merge – tends to let you get round the same problem), given he has been using this hint for as long as it’s been around (a long time!) but as it’s NOT supported we wouldn’t allow it. I’m not about to update millions of rows in a multi-billion row database with an unsupported function unless I have a MAJOR problem.

The point of the story is, that evening, we met up for drinks with another Developer (Dev2) whom we have both known for a couple of decades. Dev says to Dev2 “DBA’s – they are never happy, going around being all DBA-ish and No-you-cant today”, and (unprompted) Dev2 says “BYPASS_UJVC?”

I like Developers – I used to be one – but the role of Developer and DBA should be symbiotic and not adversarial as it can become upon occasion. We should work together – all of the best system I have delivered have a great relationship between Dev and DBA – but don’t ask me to bend my database out of shape just so you can take a short cut. Talk about physicalities, data access, data life-cycle, volume and performance before a line of code has been written and we will all work much better together. If all parties feel they have some ownership with the system, there is a greater chance of success and joy.