In a recent meeting with a group of client prospects (small department, big city), one attendee described their current use of an enterprise database as having to “pull along a huge elephant.”  He proceeded to explain that many users opted for creating their own small databases that serve their own purposes instead of pulling the elephant.

For me this relates to an earlier post, about a user of a huge, sophisticated and complicated system (huge elephant), who chose to ignore said system’s output as seemingly wrong (the output turned out to be correct).

I think there is a lesson in this for us system implementers.  Unless you are in the business of raising and selling elephants, smaller may be better.