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RDBMS, Tomcat and Aspire

A very humourously (I don’t think humour was intended though) titled article at O'ReillyNet. Improve Your Career with Tomcat and Aspire - “RDBMS staff can be easily trained to develop Web-based Java apps with Tomcat and Aspire”.

Where I work, we were a primarily DBMS group. When we wanted to web enable the data, we tried out several different things and settled for Zope. Easiest of the lot and very powerful too.

Well, I certainly liked the Career Improvement part

The author goes to great lengths on why IT should take a serious look at Relational Developers. I’ve a different twist to this. IT should take a serious look at data architects. One problem I’ve had with many relational developers - including myself till 3 years ago - is that they try to solve every problem using relational model. This often leads to unnecessary complexity. For example, a project/task/staff management system might be lot more easier if you use a hierarchical object schema rather than relational.

If I’m looking to hire people to provide me with technical solutions, I would look for learnability, flexibility and data architecture fluency much more than knowing syntax of any particular language. Then, I would look for familiarity with tools and knowledge on what to use when.

It certainly helps to have relational background, since there is too much of spreadsheet RDBMS designers in the world!