On Less is More

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Thelonius Monk once said “Wrong is Right”. I say, “Less is More”. All too often we as software developers do data collection of one sort or another, often storing results in a database table or tables, and we suffer from self-induced overkill.

We collect too much data, data that we probably will not need. Or, instead of storing the same data and simply updating it’s count on a unique column value via an Insert or Update SQL statement, we end up storing hundreds of unique rows that, because of the data collection overkill we’ve engineered, take up lots of space but don’t really contribute to the “cause”.

In addition (and I have certainly been guilty of this) we store our data in database tables that are not normalized, thereby exacerbating the situation. We end up with wide tables with a lot of columns that are inefficient.

It is often much easier (and simpler) to start out with a minimalist approach. Less is More. If we determine at a later point that we actually do need “More”, we can always add that later. I believe it is easier to add needed features to a well-thought-out basic design than to remove stuff later. It’s human nature.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Ben E3:36 AM

    You are quite right - we become so worried that our applications won't do everything that's required of them that we load them full of speculative functionality. It's taken a few years but I'm getting the hang of YAGNI.

    Even with my BI hat on what you're saying about well structured (normalised) databases holds true. Every database should exist in 3NF somewhere - even if your application uses strange denormalised structures to improve performance, these should be nothing more than derived staging tables.

    A good schema should be expandable while remaining backward compatible. Similar metrics to the interface members rule apply here: tables should have between 5 and 12 fields, but definitely no more than 20.

    I've applied this principle to a dataset with 1098 fields and 12m rows of data annually, and it's made analysis and integration a trivial exercise. The more I work with data, the more I realise that Dr Codd really knew what he on about.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg6:20 PM

    @Ben,
    Thanks for your expert comment. I work with OPC (Other People's Code) all the time and I never fail to be amazed and disappointed at the amount of unncessary complexity that developers weave into their creations.

    ReplyDelete

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