Disorganized Data

I don’t think I have talked about this already – I had a major issue with doing the initial design of our flagship product. You see, each of the devices we were interfacing to had different capabilities, and it seemed impossible to actually work out how to model these in the database. Every time I came back to the data I was trying to store, I was struck by the fact that it was generally fairly structured, but at the same time how each device was different, and had unique capabilities. This left me pondering what to do for weeks.

Finally, I came up with a solution to my problem. Rather than attempting to store everything in the database directly, I would store the protocol definitions in an XML file, and probably store this in the database. Sure, it is a cop out, but it works. In the long term we might put most of the information into a database, and overload the XML as required, but that leads to complexity that we really do not need at the moment.

Sometimes the best solution is not the technically right solution.