[Mouse47]

>That's not an old/young argument.

Oh I wasn't saying it was -- just providing examples for when the hand-waving/dismissive attitude by senior developers isn't really backed by anything. I'm pretty skeptical of 'because I said so' answers nowadays (by both young and old devs).

>then have the key/value schema for anything oddball

Agreed, as long as 'oddball' means 'dynamic/customer-specific' and not 'we're too lazy to design a schema for this' ;)

[Clubber]

Yes, I'm prepared to defend any design decision I have all day if I have to. I like discussing / arguing things because someone else might have thought of something I didn't consider. It's about making a good product, not about who wins. I use the pro/con model. That's probably lost on most people, especially defensive ones. I get aggravated by "because I said so," too. When you're older, you don't get dismissed as much if at all.

My mentor was a huge arguer, that's probably where I got it from. He'd start talking louder and spittle would come out at me and everything. It was ugly, but I got used to it. We'd go at it for hours, but we both knew when we came up with the right decision and were receptive to it. I like to think I'm quite a bit more tactful than he is though.

>Agreed, as long as 'oddball' means 'dynamic/customer-specific' and not 'we're too lazy to design a schema for this' ;)

Oh god, I suffer over schema design decisions more than I should, but sometimes, relational just doesn't fit what I'm doing. What's really helped is I got stuck doing reports for a huge schema my 2nd two years and I really saw what crappy design could do to performance. My favorite is when a schema has missing foreign keys on 80% of the tables. It's like they discovered foreign keys 3/4 of the way through the project and didn't bother to retrofit them.