Opinion: Sticking with a plan even if you don't like it
Something I really struggle with in this industry is when newcomers to a system want to change standards within existing systems because they think something else is better. It’s a sign of immaturity yet it often applies to people who should be senior. Many system architects fall into this category.
What’s in a PK name?
For example, a vendor system that I’ve been working with has single column primary keys in all tables, and all the primary key columns are named PKey_ID (I’ve changed it a bit to protect the guilty). Now I can’t say I like that naming at all, but that’s not the point. There are a large number of tables that already have that naming scheme.
So what does the new architect (who has a purist view) want to do when he arrives? He wants to name all new columns as ID instead. Again, I really dislike this naming (it’s too generic), but I don’t care what the vendor does, apart from being consistent.
Yet what the architect does is make the change so that a handful of tables now have ID as the column name. That’s a really, really poor outcome. If he really wants to change them, then come up with a plan to change all of them.
And we all know that won’t be trivial. He needs to determine all the existing references to those names, before starting to change them. Otherwise, he should have continued with the existing plan.
SQL Server
I see the same thing in SQL Server.
We already had:
- tinyint
- smallint
- int
- bigint
And we already had:
- smalldatetime
- datetime
So when a larger precision version of a date and time needed to be added, it wouldn’t have taken Einstein to come up with bigdatetime.
The answer certainly wouldn’t have been datetime2 which is what we got.
Oh, you say, but datetime2 is really a combination of the new date and time data types, and we already had a datetime data type, so it couldn’t be that.
Yes, but what then happened with datetimeoffset? It’s a datetime2 with an offset, so why isn’t it datetime2offset?
Is there an answer?
What’s the answer? I’m not 100% sure, but I do wish these teams had more cranky old dudes who look at proposed designs and say nah, have another go at it.
2026-03-15