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0 pointsgrey-area13y ago0 comments

What are common database development mistakes made by application developers?

It is a question, an open question intended to provoke debate and teach about a subject, in effect it's a request for an FAQ. Now perhaps SO is not intended to be for that sort of question, and that is of course for SO to decide.

I suppose the reason many people come to SO to read questions is that they'd like to learn about a subject area, and the reason many people come is write answers is that they'd like to teach a little about a subject, and this sort of open-ended questions offer the opportunity for someone to answer questions the asker didn't even know they had - like should I add an index to my db, if so when? Should I use natural keys? etc. To in effect tell them to unask all those questions they would otherwise have asked in groping their way to familiarity with the subject. It functions as an FAQ for that particular subject, to prevent beginners from making the same mistakes/asking the same questions over and over.

So that sort of question can be very useful for someone starting out, for the kind of person your site targets. Maybe that sort of question belongs on some other site though, a sort of training site rather than a question/answer site, or maybe SO should just expand to encompass that sort of FAQ function?

I'm not so convinced that for this category of question there is a clear line between 'db x breaks when I do y, what should I do?', 'Do I need to use db transactions in db x?', and 'What are the common db mistakes?', and that one sort of question/answer is rational, and another narrative - is the division really that clear? Are there not many many borderline questions which solicit opinion (of someone who knows more about the subject), and yet are useful for others too? Are not many of these smaller 'science-in-the-small' questions actually answerable in many different ways, each of which may be somewhat valid and none of which is actually 'right' in some categorical way?

For example this question, which is equally open-ended, remains open (rightly so I think as it could be a useful discussion :)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327199/what-will-we-do-af...

0 comments

codinghorror13y ago

> or maybe SO should just expand to encompass that sort of FAQ function?

Some of the tag wikis do this:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/java/info

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%23/info

So Cletus' post might make more sense as the tag wiki for, say:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/database/info

grey-areaOP13y ago

Yes it could although the wikis don't contain the other alternative questions or the dialogue which make Q&A sessions involving several people who know the subject well useful for other readers. For many questions (particularly open ones) there are many answers, and no right answer for all circumstances, so there is no clear division between this question/answers and other longer more specific ones as to being opinion or fact - they're mostly a mix of both.

Because people will inevitably continually ask/answer these questions and many similar more specific and yet still open ones and see the resulting debate as useful on any QA site, it might be good to have a more structured way of moving them to an FAQ section on SO, without destroying all the ad-hoc relations and rewards that users have built up using your QA format (i.e. not turning them into a wiki, which doesn't really suit them and loses all the attribution, comments, discussion etc).

It feels a little draconian at present sometimes when useful answers are marked as 'trivial' or 'not constructive' when they clearly are constructive, but are constructive in a direction SO didn't anticipate.

rhizome13y ago

I have to wonder if the original plan was to leverage the question answering as a wiki generator, but if so they should put pointers on closed questions. I'm not sure whether I have a problem with how SO is conducting themselves, since it could simply be that they're opinionated about what constitutes valid content and aren't afraid to leave the other stuff to other sites. That is, I'm not sure Zawinsky's Law can be extended to GYOFB situations.

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