Message-ID: <001c01c30952$890face0$6401a8c0@DUNSLANE>
From: "Andrew Dunstan" <andrew@dunslane.net>
To: "PostgreSQL Hackers" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
References: 
 <D90A5A6C612A39408103E6ECDD77B8294CDBB3@voyager.corporate.connx.com>
Subject: Re: Are we losing momentum?
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 00:40:58 -0400
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Dann Corbit" <DCorbit@connx.com>
> One of the major reasons for reporting servers is that people who do not
> understand the data (or even SQL very well) will often cause great
> problems in ad-hoc query situations.
>
> Those performing the queries typically do not understand the data very
> well.  This is especially true in a database with hundreds or thousands
> of tables.  Usually, they will have a pretty good understanding of a
> small subset of the tables that contain the information that they are
> after, but even that is not always true.
>

*nod*

This is something to be addressed by policy rather than technology, I
suspect. One large and famous financial institution I worked at had a simple
policy regarding production DBs: all client access was to be through stored
procedures. This was enforced by the DB's own privileges system - only the
SPs were visible, and they could only be installed by the database group.
This also forced the developers to abstract the DB access into a separate
layer, so that when it was productised only that layer needed to be changed
(this is a Good Thing (tm)).

andrew