An Elegant Example

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine was a smart guy and one of my favorite writers. Of course it helps that I am fluent in French and can read his works as they were written. His quote about perfection is very true. Lately I have been working with a coworker to get a Hadoop cluster running and that has been an exercise in frustration. I am glad that Oracle had much better documentation writers when I was learning SQL. Otherwise I might be working in a completely different industry.

A lot of credit should go out to Bruce Scott for creating Oracle's scott/tiger example database tables. It started with just a couple of tables that could be used to provide examples for all of Oracle's SQL commands. The beauty of them was their simplicity. You basically had a table listing employees with basic information and a second table listing departments. Each employee belonged to a department, which allowed for a number of different JOIN examples between the two tables. Furthermore, each employee reported to another one except for KING, who as his name indicated, was the head honcho. Both tables were so small, you had them memorized after the first three examples. They were also so simple there was just a NAME column. No need to memorize a first name and a last name and the names were just a single syllable.

Version 6 of the Oracle database added a few more tables and then some genius decided to complicate things with an entirely new and overly complex set of tables. I understand that a lot of new features were added, but the simplicity of the original scott/tiger tables should have served as a pattern for future examples. Now I only wish Hadoop's document writers had noticed as well.