Re-inventing the wheel!

A very interesting blog entry from MVP Aaron Bertrand was posted the other day. It’s worth looking at just for the picture!!!

How many people consider the programming costs of writing and maintaining a bespoke application when they choose the options available to complete a given task? Programmers tend to think that writing something themselves has zero cost…. WRONG!!

One of the areas I so often see this, is when you have a data upload application. It gets written, then changed because it’s not quite right, then changed again because of a schema change, and after half a dozen changes someone else takes a look at it because it is taking hours to complete and doesn’t fit into the window you have to run it (and because of the spaghetti code this task takes longer than expected to complete and overruns!!),  then it gets changed again and again so eventually it’s back to taking too long to complete again… etc…etc..

All this when a SSIS package could have been written and maintained in a fraction of the time and cost. Not that this will always be the case… but quite often it is!!