For database administrators, the term “constraints” comes up often. It refers to rules placed on what types of data can be stored in the database, and where it can be stored. Relational databases are containers that organize information into tables, columns, and rows, like a spreadsheet but more powerful, with linkages and relations between the tables. This logical organization of data led to billions in profits over the past fifty years. I spent a decade working for Oracle, one of the database heavyweight contenders, so I had a good amount of exposure to products built on both good and bad database design.

Having worked on products that used minimal constraints in database design, I learned the hard way that front-line support teams must do daily trench battles against customer issues that could have been avoided by proper design. A lack of proper “constraints” on the database, or having no limits or rules, leads to a mess, a bunch of noise, that eventually turns into a jumbled heap of garbage data. The saying, “Crap in, crap out,” is used to describe this scenario. If anything can be put into the database, a problem lurks. When you go to use that data to extract reports, you can be fairly certain the data will be badly formatted and unfit for consumption.

Unexpected errors spring up due to the disordered mess that has been allowed into the data tables. The result is spending a lot of time in dangerous database surgery, crafting INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to repair the mess, and mistakes can kill a business application. Fortunately, working with software does not involve actual living things, so if you kill a database or application, people don’t die. Unless of course that database or application is supporting medical procedures or critical inventory systems. Then it is very possible that the death of the database can lead to pain elsewhere.

You can see where this is going.

There is an obvious parallel to database management and our lives, both individually and socially. Database design is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Ordering chaos is what most of human life is about, and because so much of our lives is about ordering chaos, it is exactly why the opening in the book of Genesis is about bringing order to chaos. This point should not be missed if you ever open your Bible to page 1 and read the first paragraph.

This may seem a stretch, but the urge to create a spreadsheet, which is to bring order to chaos, has a parallel to the greatest mystery of why our universe and world exist at all. The act of “creating” is to take material and thoughts and try to give them a shape that makes sense. A painter at an easel with a blank canvas is much like the spreadsheet creator, or woodworker, or musician, or even someone trying to organize a closet-gone-wild. They start with resources in a disordered state and an idea in their mind. In creation they merge the physical with the spiritual, just as we are body and soul.

The act of creation starts with an action, an idea, and organization, and that is why the saying, “Let there be light” does not refer to the sun. Whenever someone gets hung up on the sun being created on the fourth day instead of the first, I feel that this act of creation is misunderstood, as the “light” is the action of merging of physical and the spiritual, body and soul. “Light” is the first step toward ordering the chaos.

There’s a saying in the software world that “every product started out as a spreadsheet.” A spreadsheet is often started by someone in the office to try and make sense of what is happening in the business, or with customers, or even with something as simple as coffee machine duties. There’s usually someone who is bothered by the disorder just enough to take action. The same sense of chaos that leads someone to file for running for city council is the same notion that drives an office worker to open a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and start naming columns and entering data in rows. When the artist first touches her brush to the canvas, or when the spreadsheet creator clicks the File → New option on the menu of a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, an act of creation is underway. All of our acts of creation are contingent on God’s creation, as without gravity and matter, our spreadsheet would not be needed.

We want order, because chaos becomes unbearable, and you can do three things to deal with chaos: you can fight the chaos, you can flee the chaos, or you can live in the chaos. If you choose to live in it, you may handle it in a few ways, some of which will lead you to peace or others that make you insane.

The saying, “There’s a spreadsheet for that” long precedes the saying “There’s an app for that.” Once various entrepreneurs realized the data they were tracking had relevance to a wider audience, the spreadsheet turned into a database and then eventually a user interface is added, and suddenly you need salespeople to go forth and tell the world. In this way, a product is born. The idea is conceived in the inventor’s mind and willed into existence by tools and skills. There is a “let there be light” moment followed by taking action and creating.

A single spreadsheet managed by one person is not a workable solution for large problems. Once the spreadsheet creator leaves the simple shire of the spreadsheet, he or she faces numerous questions around access rights and restrictions. Updates can cause chaos without proper locks, requirements, and referential integrity. In database design these are known as constraints, which are like the castle walls controlling what data comes into the database, or like laws regarding what types of data are allowed to live in this little kingdom of data. People have become billionaires in finding ways to represent data effectively, as without organization, data is a pile of chaff that cannot even be burned for heat. Data is utterly useless without organization.

Too few constraints or too many constraints both create problems. If I get started on database talk, this could be a long episode, so I’ll keep this part short. I’ve spent a career poking around in databases and log files looking at error codes and messages. Not a very glamorous life, and I have often joked about being in “log file hell,” when a customer dumps 2 gigabytes of log output into my lap for troubleshooting. This blog/podcast could easily change from the topic of falling, recovery, and reverted faith into one about troubleshooting databases and software error codes. Why Did Peter Sink? would be about error stacks, bug fixing, and system stabilization. The interesting thing, however, is even if the topic changed from restored faith to database troubleshooting, the main message would still be around order, disorder, and re-ordering, which is what the book of Genesis and the Gospels are really all about.

To deny this yearning for order results in collapse rather quickly, because if there is no desire for order, or no faith in the system, data systems can turn sour as quickly as milk. There is a kind of faith needed in a product for it to last. The data must provide a sense of order, and meaning to the users. Otherwise someone or something will replace the system or employees will just leave, if they have any means whatsoever to do so. There is faith required even in the purely material world of software and data, because in the end the users are human. But faith in a product to assist keeping order at a job or corporation is different from the kind of faith needed to order your life.

Staring into chaos can be done for a long time, when times are good. Non-believers and pure materialists have obviously always been part of society, and surely they rolled their eyes at the religious nuts back in Jesus’ time as much as they do today, but they are typically the fringe of society, not the center that holds all things together. The rules and need for order get sidelined when affluence and plenty seem to have solved all problems. You’ll see this in business when times are good, where there is largesse and generosity, which leads to abuses and corruption. Then the recession hits and the disorder and lack of discipline is called out. Layoffs happen. Hiring is frozen. People suddenly have to justify their purpose. The comfort of good fiscal quarters leads to corruption and laziness, and when the belt gets tightened, the fringes get squeezed first. But the fringe doesn’t go away. It just goes into hiding for a bit. The heart always wants to explore the fringes.

Wise societies allow for this searching, leaving small openings in life open to the wanderers. Even strict nations have dedicated days for wandering and loosening the rules, because holidays like Halloween and Mardi Gras and Carnival and Purim offer release valves for rebellion and rowdiness. These festivals came out of the need to allow some pressure out of the balloon. Mount Saint Helens blew its top off because there was no escape for the pressure. Hawaiian volcanoes have lava dribble nicely out the top because the pressure is not bound up as tightly. This is the tightrope that cities have to walk. How much disorder should we allow? Towns and villages have annual festivals for drinking and staying up late, because it grants a hall pass for the standard of work and faith in something greater. This is to avoid the Mount Saint Helens type of explosion.

Cities have streets or districts where vice is allowed, or at least ignored. Driving or walking on these streets can make for jaw-dropping tourism for the uninitiated. I recall driving down Hastings Avenue in Vancouver, B.C., in broad daylight, where someone was using a toilet that was just sitting on the street (no plumbing). Prostitutes in ripped fishnet stockings were seeking clients. Various lost souls smoked crack openly. Every boarded up doorway housed a body or two, apparently sleeping.

It seems that all cities have this street: Prospect in Kansas City, Langstrasse in Zurich, or Hastings in Vancouver, etc. Every city has a neighborhood like this, just like every small town has a bar or house where the fringe can gather. People drive down these streets for a kind of Poverty Tour (a.k.a. Poverty Porn) of how the other half lives. These places make for a kind of living cautionary tale, like that which parents can use to cudgel children away from drugs and other bad patterns. “Do you see what happens, kid, when you do drugs?”

Small towns make for interesting interactions because a full variety of vices, worldviews, and systems of belief are shoved close to one another and must interact, whereas in larger cities you can live in one area without ever touching or interacting with those different from you. In a small town, you do not have that option of isolation. The town drunk and the mayor may be in the same diner or grocery store or church. But what I’m driving at is a city or a country thing, nor a race or class or national thing. It's a human thing.

The "fringe" element in small towns and cities are granted an outlet to avoid an eruption, as complete suppression results in a blast. This is same reason that sandboxes are placed outside for children rather than in the kitchen. Individuals and societies allow exploration to play out, because it’s going to play out whether you allow it or not. Even the most repressed societies have rebellion in secret underworlds. But this is not due to the repression or the rules, as some would have us believe. This exploration and rebellion happens. Why? Because we are fallen creatures.

We need a sandbox to play in, a development area, a place to thrash about. Just as cities cordon off a street for this exploration, database administrators create non-production environments, sometimes called “sandboxes” where any wild-child programmer can go play, break things, try on data, running through rows and flipping tables. The key thing for keeping organization is that you do not experiment with what you already know works and is running the business. You allow the skunk-works stuff over in the fringe, the development database, but never, ever in the database which puts dollars on the balance sheet.

This may seem a geeky metaphor to compare to cities with their red-light districts, or to our lives with their periods of rebellion, but it is hardly different. Cities allow the inevitable rowdiness, within reason, and database designers provide a romper room, and if the city or the database admin had their way, they would prefer to have as little of this disorder as possible. Yet it’s allowed, because to completely stifle all experimentation and rebellion leads to the spread of mayhem to the entire city. In businesses, the rebel programmer forces will just start their own shadow IT. Users and party-seekers stop asking for permission altogether.

God allows us some rope, to wander and explore, otherwise we may never learn what the rules are for in the first place. The forgiveness of sins is not a get out of jail free card so much as it’s an understanding and loving Father who knows of our need to seek out the dragon. God is not the rigid Pharisee, who is like a city administrator that cracks down on every last jaywalker in the street, or the database administrator that allows no access and no data for anyone and kills all creativity. He is the loving Father that prefers we stayed but knows we’ll stray, and when we return from our dragon-quest beaten and broken, he will not even say, “I told you so.” That is the Father of the New Covenant. The words of Jesus speak of this type of Father, and this is Our Father, meaning yours and mine and everyone else’s.

For some reason unknown to us, God allows sin. This is the perhaps the most confusing thing of all about the Creator. This drives many away from belief because we know sin is the cause of suffering, so how can it be allowed? Yet we can see the same pattern in our world happening all the time, which seems to confirm that we are indeed made in the image and likeness of God. When we try to bring order, we also allow the fringe, and just as the city allows a small red light district in order to preserve a wider peace and order. The IT department grants a corner for chaos so that the business can operate and maybe benefit from creative ideas that come out of the fringe.

In all cases, good things can come out of the allowance for rebellion. The rebirth of a city, a business, or a person can happen out of this model. Beautiful things can come from those drifters and dreamers, as long as they don’t get stuck there forever in despair. The key is to grow, to learn, to come back, and with God, the key is always to surrender, and rather than defeat the dragon, you accept self-defeat, you accept the mystery, and God defeats the dragon for you.

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