Databasen - Revisited

[Nicholas Clark]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 11:35:16PM -0400, Matt Sergeant wrote:

> and redundancy. I suspect the people who wrote it are probably very  
> careful about optimising every bit of their code too. Or perhaps they  
> should just trust their optimiser. :-)

Mmmm. Optimisers are software. There are two things I trust about software:

1: it has bugs
2: it is hateful

( see http://nick.hates-software.com/ and http://we.hates-software.com/ )

And it occurs to me that "Optimisers are written by humans. That's
just added another level of indirection, and hence potential for error"

To restate what I think was your original point some messages ago:

Yes, usually, hardware costs less than humans. But not always.

Nicholas Clark