About 5 years ago, I was asked to write a php app for my department. The app
keeps track of graduate school applicants to my department at the
university. The main data elements are the scores each professor gives to
each applicant. There are only about 400 applicants each year so even with
all the personal data, scores, transcripts, etc for each student, it's not
much. for the first 2 years, it was under a meg of data. Well, then the
selection committee asked me to add something so that if a student e-mailed
the department a document, say a paper he'd written or a photo of himself,
or whatever, it could be tacked on to the info they saw about him while
grading the applicant.
So I said, "Well, there is only going to be maybe 10 or 20 of those a year.
And even if all 400 applicants submit a PDF of a paper they'd written, it
would be only 400 docs. 4,000 after 10 years. Yeah, lets just create a
documents table in the database and store them in mysql."
For the first 2 years, only 2 students sent in documents to attach to their
application. I figured I'd wasted my time. Then the next year, the graduate
school changed their web application form to allow students to upload
documents. "Fine," I said, "My worst case scenario has already come true.
But, well, this is why you plan for the worst case."
Then they started taking letters of recommendation as PDF documents. In
fact, they started requiring PDF docs. Each student has 3 to 6 letters of
recommendation. All in all, I figure we're at about 100 times as many docs
in our database as I originally expected and about 10x my worst case
scenario.
I should either be fired or shot. Maybe fired *then* shot. Actually, its
not as bad as all that. I can pretty easily write a perl script to export
the docs to files and access them via a network mounted filesystem. After
all, saving myself 5 hours of work 5 years ago is worth what? -- maybe
10hours today? It is amazing how often quick & dirty turns out just being
dirty in the end.
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