I know what makes me sick and what makes me well, but that dosen't make me a doctor.
Knowledge of a specific business domain dosen't qualify you through some holy invocation to be a database designer.
Sounds like I'm taking a pretty hard line on this :)
Really it all stems from seeing people put in way too much effort to
cope with bad ideas. Take for example this pretty simple rule of
normalization:
- Every time a row and column meet, that cell should hold one and only one bit of data.
Break that rule and you will be forever doomed to write hard to
maintain queries. I was just discussing a scenario that needed
to regularly update part of a field for a large number of
rows. Luckily that scenario isn't seeing the light of day
<phew>
So, what criteria do you think should be on the test that issues licenses to develop databases?