The young man proudly surveyed his newly purchased farm land. His vision for this land was to be a model of modern agricultural practices with an emphasis on working in harmony with nature. One thing troubled him, though. Right in the center of the field, a huge tree raised its branches high over the surrounding earth, blocking the sun his new crops would need to thrive.
Not wanting to sacrifice the magnificent tree, the new farmer began searching for ways to ensure that adequate sunlight reached all of his crops, without falling the tree or even trimming back its branches. The search led him down several dead-ends, including one scheme to rig up polished mirrors to redirect sunlight back under the tree. Everything he tried was a dead-end; some of the proposed solutions could have worked, but they would require costly additional equipment and intense, on-going labor to maintain. Not only that, the tree itself took up valuable space that could have been devoted to revenue producing crops. Preserving the tree was going to require costly compromises of one sort or another and in every case, lost productivity. Yet, the neophyte farmer refused to give up the beautiful tree, his beloved tree....
In desperation, he reached out to agricultural experts in nearby colleges and government agencies, looking for a solution that would increase productivity of his land while allowing him to keep his beloved tree in all its magnificent glory.
The experts, alas, were unanimous in their recommendation: Remove the tree or go broke .
The moral of this fable is this.
I spend a lot of time at various Access forums, reading questions from new developers. They are new database "farmers” and they come for help with design problems. They present their troubled database proudly, trees and all and ask the experts how to solve a problem. When they are told —as they almost always are—that the best course of action will be to remove the tree, that is, they are told to redesign the tables in the troubled relational database application, they throw up their hands in horror, proclaiming love for their tree. They can’t bear the thought of removing it. They just need an inexpensive, workable, and preferably simple, way to get sunlight into the shadows under their tree, not remove it!
Far too often, I fear, those young database farmers are still out there, trying to make their poorly design databases work because they can’t stand the thought of abandoning the beautiful tree they have planted.