Databasen - Revisited

[Peter Corlett]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 07:09:42AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
[...]
> Mmmm. Optimisers are software. There are two things I trust about software:
> 1: it has bugs
> 2: it is hateful

Sure, see one of the alt.sysadmin.recovery mantras: all software sucks, all
hardware sucks (although they concede that the PDP-10 was OK.)

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

The kind of people who hack on optimisers for fun have big bulgy brains and
lots of experience in that field, and I'm not arrogant enough to believe
that I, a jack-of-all-trades, know better.