Comment by TickleSteve
9 years ago
This is exactly the point he was making.
People have a desire to use the 'big' tools instead of trying to solve the real problem.
People both underestimate the power of their desktop machine and the 'old' tools and overestimate the size of their task.
Occasionally designers seem to seek credit merely for possessing a new technology, rather than using it to make better designs. Computers and their affiliated apparatus can do powerful things graphically, in part by turning out the hundreds of plots necessary for good data analysis. But at least a few computer graphics only evoke the response "Isn’t it remarkable that the computer can be programmed to draw like that?" instead of "My, what interesting data".
- Edward Tufte
Applies to more than just design.
>People have a desire to use the 'big' tools
Not only that, people seems to love claiming that they're "big data", perhaps because it makes them sound impressive and bigger than they are.
Very few of us will ever do projects that justifies using tools like Hadoop and to few us are willing to accept that our data fits in SQLite.
Yeah, someone was telling me they need big data for a million rows. I laughed and said SQLite handles that...
I would not want to be the one on-call for a million row SQLite database!
I would. That's a pager that's never going off.
8 replies →
I'm curious why you think SQLite is a database technology that somehow can't handle a million rows.
Thousands of customers, millions of rows, 0 DB issues. All bugs are mine. And the damn thing even does JSON querying now.
I love it when clients think they need a server workstation
Specs be damned!
I need to start selling boxes