Staff with a vast experience in NoSQL design?

Some days you come across implementations that make you doubt the sanity of the IT industry. That and our collective ability to learn and make progress.

Note: No fungi, plants, animals or humans were hurt due to the below. It did hurt the psychological well being of one DBA. He’s recovering well en doing fine. thank you for asking.

Some time back I came across this “beauty” at a company that spends many millions per year on developer staff and consultants. It makes uses of modern tools, technologies, frame works. They have coaches for anything you can imagine etc. From a budget and resource perspective they checks all the right boxes. They have analysts, project managers and ITIL with change board and all. Apparently they’re also very deeply invested in and have a staff with a vast experience in NoSQL design. Pun intended.

So on a Windows Server 2016 virtual machine, running SQL Server 2016 there was a request to implement a change to a table: add a ‘MonthNumber’ column to a table. That’s when you find these gems of table design:

It’s in Dutch but most of you will notice what’s the issue here.  The optimists call this “NOSQL” I’m sure, and they’re welcome to it .

You don’t have to fight all fights

The good news is they don’t design mission critical systems, don’t do civil engineering or develop software for life or death surgery with robotics. Normally when it’s something that matters this sets off all the alarms and we have to intervene. But they’re quite happy with it and it’s all ITIL approved and compliant with the DevOps  &  agile principles they adhere to. That’s quite a challenge for any organization, to combine these successfully.

I have no skin in this game, so I quietly walked away and when the column was added they were happy and at peace. This fight is not mine, not today.