Really, really tight coupling

Posted by Jeremy Miller on October 18, 2005

It’s time for another episode in the continuing saga of “doing stupid things in stored procedures.” 


My colleague is looking at some code that we need to modify with a temporary fix.  The legacy system calls into a stored procedure which then takes the arguments coming in and passes them to a COM object (via DCOM) to send an email (it also decides whether to send the email).  The COM object promptly opens up a database connection to go back to the very same database to get more information in order to create an email.  And of course there’s the issue that the stored procedure is called from middle tier code to begin with.  WTF.  There are so many things wrong with this scenario that I don’t even know where to begin.


 

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://flimflan.com/blog Joshua Flanagan

    By the way, the moderators on this site are losing it. This story is a repost.

    http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2005/09/12/131878.aspx

    (at least I HOPE there aren’t 2 distinct instances of this mess)

  • http://flimflan.com/blog Joshua Flanagan

    It’s amazing that it doesn’t involve Excel in there somewhere (right?)

    http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/434.aspx

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/ sahilmalik

    Y’know here is what I struggle with. Honestly the code you mentioned above gives me the creeps. I get the gut feeling that, maybe going through all those loops and that kind of criss cross/unclean architecture is a bad idea.

    I GET THAT !!

    What I struggle with is, guys who lack that gut feel – who smell shit and say, this is a rose.

    Y’know shit by any other name, still smells like shit !!