A question I often ask as I do presentations around the world is who has studied any Database Design subjects at university? What I am trying to gauge when I ask this question is the number of people who have been exposed to set based theory. Time and time again I find that it is only a handful of people that have had any formal higher education in databases. I for one think that the best way to learn is on the job experience; however, I think a lot can be said for having a good grounding in the basics of set theory.
Time and time again when I look at data access code it is procedural based. That is, the developer is trying to tell SQL Server what to do rather then what they want returned. A developer typically thinks about code in the format For i = 1 to Count. Hence, the reason that many problems are solved as cursor based solutions rather than set based solutions.
When you look at any line of business application there are very few if any that do not have a database. So why do higher education intuitions continue to ignore database design in favour of the hottest new development language?
- Peter Ward