Optimisation, afterthought or not

It is funny how placing your ideas on an open stage makes one re-consider ones position.

I mentioned in this post on How Google Earth Really Works about how optimisation at my workplace is an afterthought.

Ahhhh, no!

I started to realise that optimisation of our applications has such a solid foundation that it 'blends into the woodwork' of my daily existence. It was enlightening looking at another problem domain's optimisations.

We develop business software in Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, Forms and Java with all sorts of other things like Perl, PHP and Shell scripting, even some old PRO*C code.

So what has blended into the background:

• SQL statements over networks are course grained calls, which work well.
  
• Indexes are always used for primary keys and foreign keys.
  
• Oracle Forms uses those indexes and have reasonable optimisation defaults.
  
• We tend to design using denormalised large tables, normalisation can have a drastic effect on performance, even in todays crazy supercomputers.
  
• Probably a lot more that I can't see for the trees at the moment.
  

p.s. My spellchecker makes me aware that I am not writing US English, I am writing in UK/NZ English. For those who don't know, the words above do not end in 'ize' :).