I was thinking about some of my skills sets today and this lead me to a realization.

I consider myself to be good with relational databases. I may not be an expert guru, but I have designed and implemented some pretty complex systems, very well IMO.

The realization was that I rely to much on GUI interfaces. Yes, they are great and help get things done faster but in the instant the GUI was not available would I be able to function? True, I could always jump onto Google but my productivity would be greatly reduced because I would have to look up a lot of things.

I also realized that I tended to be more disciplined when a GUI was available. For example, when working with MSSQL I used plenty of Sotred Procedures and was extremely careful to make sure all contraints and relationships were in place. However, when using MySQL, usually phpMyAdmin, I rarely used an SP or setup relationships.

So why is that? Because for MSSQL there are nice GUI interfaces to let me quickly and easily add all those good things but in phpMyAdmin there is noway to add them except through queries.

Conclusion, I am lazy. I am working on this but it is true. This is by no means a good excuse to ignore good practices.

So here’s to using a little less GUI and brushing up on some advanced SQL techniques in the near future.