Deja Vu

One of the sites that has recently made it to my bookmarks is The Daily WTF.
Reading it gives me a nice sense of job security...

One of the recent stories on there was an app that was running slowly due to a DB with no indexes or Primary keys

Same thing happened at my last company - a dev working on his own with not much DB experience, no senior guy reviewing his work and no performance testing ( that was what customers were for )

Customer complains the program runs like a dog, senior guy looks into the problem and rocks back and forth on his chair laughing like a maniac and pointing at the screen when he finds out the cause.

The small lesson learnt was that performance testing would be a good thing to do.

Another solution would have been to impose a formal code and design review.

However, the main lesson I learnt was about communication - if the senior guy had taken a moment and some interest in what the other person was doing it could have been picked up before it was shipped.

( and I wonder if a devious company could ship their DB like that and when the customer complains about the speed then perform the indexing, ship V2 and hey presto, great increase in speed and a happy customer.... )