Words I Don’t Use, Part 3: “Best Practice”

The third “word I do not use” is best practice.

The “best practice” serves a vital need in any industry. It is the answer to, “Please don’t make me learn about this; just tell me what to do.” The “best practice” is a fine idea in spirit, but here’s the thing: many practices labeled “best” don’t deserve the adjective. They’re often containers for bad advice.

The most common problem with “best practices” is that they’re not parameterized like they should be. A good practice usually depends on something: if this is true, then do that; otherwise, do this other thing. But most “best practices” don’t come with conditions of execution—they often contain no if statements at all. They come disguised as recipes that can save you time, but they often encourage you to skip past thinking about things that you really ought to be thinking about.

Most of my objections to “best practices” go away when the practices being prescribed are actually good. But the ones I see are often not, like the old SQL “avoid full-table scans” advice. Enforcing practices like this yields applications that don’t run as well as they should and developers that don’t learn the things they should. Practices like “Measure the efficiency of your SQL at every phase of the software life cycle,” are actually “best”-worthy, but alas, they’re less popular because they sound like real work.

Words I Don’t Use, Part 2: “Holistic”

The second “word I do not use” is holistic.

When people use the word “holistic” in my industry (Oracle), it means that they’re paying attention to not just an individual subcomponent of a system, but to a whole system, including (I hope) even the people it serves.

But trying to differentiate technology services by saying “we take a holistic view of your system” is about like differentiating myself by saying I’ll wear clothes to work. Saying “holistic” would make it look like I’ve only just recently become aware that optimizing a system’s individual subsystems is not a reliable way to optimize the system itself. This should not be a distinctive revelation.

Words I Don’t Use, Part 1: “Methodology”

Today, I will begin a brief sequence of blog posts that I’ll call “Words I Don’t Use.” I hope you’ll have some fun with it, and maybe find a thought or two worth considering.

The first word I’ll discuss is methodology. Yes. I made a shirt about it.

Approximately 100% of the time in the [mostly non-scientific] Oracle world that I live in, when people say “methodology,” they’re using it in the form that American Heritage describes as a pretentious substitute for “method.” But methodology is not the same as method. Methods are processes. Sequences of steps. Methodology is the scientific study of methods.

I like this article called “Method versus Methodology” by Peter Klein, which cites the same American Heritage Dictionary passage that I quoted on page 358 of Optimizing Oracle Performance.