I have trouble criticizing your former programming self for making a decision at an earlier time with the limited information, knowledge and experience. Hindsight is ALWAYS 20/20 and none of our earlier programming would stand up to much scrutiny using today's knowledge and experience. Besides, I've seen a lot of early mainframe programming that made the same kinds of decisions based on the best knowledge they had at the time. Any Cobol programmers out there remember Y2K?
I forgave my early programming, ignorant self a long time ago and tried to learn and do better every day going forward. Now when I look back at my earliest code, I try to focus on the mistakes I could have made but didn't. :)
Paul H. Tarver
-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of M Jarvis Sent: Friday, February 22, 2019 11:57 AM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: false news....
On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 6:11 AM Kevin J Cully kjcully@cherokeega.com wrote: <snip>
I had a potential client where they based their primary keys based on employee Social Security Numbers. They didn't like it when I told them that they'd need a complete rewrite. Notice this would have been the case no matter what language/technology they were using. It was just piss poor design.
<snip>
I must confess.... I did this once and used SSN's as a primary key. It is my shame....
I was told I had a year and a half to write a enterprise wide application and out of the blue the reality was I had about 3 weeks, and failure would have cost millions and millions... oh - and my job...
I was panicked and the first thing I thought to use was the SSN thinking that certainly they wouldn't be changing so as a PK would be handy to use. I went for it w/o thinking it through...
Granted, this was back in the day when the internet wasn't what we think of today, but still - it was a really dumb dumb idea I always regretted...