Ask a stupid question...

From time to time we get people in the forums seeking advice about really bad notions. Like this chap yesterday, who wants to turn an Oracle database into a mainframe-style IDMS emulator. The title of the thread captures the full horror: "How to block readers in Oracle?" Yes, they want to disable Oracle's multi-user concurrency model to prevent people issuing SELECT statements against rows which are locked by DML from other sessions. A similar recurring nightmare is the utterly generic data model. Another is changing the physical order of columns in a table.

It's hard to know how to deal with such questions. It's easy enough to just scream No! No! No! but that's not very helpful. We can explain why it's a bad idea, and sometimes that's enough for the poster to gain enlightenment. But often it happens that the questioner is being driven into a bad implementation by daft user requirements. Now the appropriate tactic in this scenario is to advise the OP to go back to their users and explain why the requirement is a bad idea. Unfortunately it can be a tough thing to do, especially if the user outranks you and/or pays your salary. Of course, we know that IT practitioners are brave, noble and wise (not to mention good looking) but many people outside the IT department regard us as servitors and trolls, employed to do their bidding without question.

So. Should we help people implement a bad solution because they don't have any choice? Or should we refuse to help them because what they are being asked to do something stupid? As people answering questions in the forums we have a moral obligation to be intelligent. But do we have us the right to judge others for failing to meet their obligation?

In the case of the would-be IDMS implementer I chose to post a partial solution, with a view to demonstrating the probable shonkiness of the actual application. Ideally this, together with warnings from me and other Forum regulars, ought to have persuaded the OP to reconsider their approach. Instead they come back with an even shonkier implementation:

"We are planning to create a new table that will have tablename,primary key column value and flag .User who issues FOR UPDATE statement should insert data and flag as 'Y'. At the end this record should be deleted .

Any user before trying to read the record should check for entry of this record in that table .If found , then we will keep him on hold by executing a procedure in loop until record not found."

And that's when I knew I should have turned them over to the Oracle WTF Police in the first place.