I have a situation here at work. We are redeveloping our basic architecture across the entire company.

Currently we have the following hierarchy;

SQL Database <= Stored Procs not allowed.

nHibernate

Classes to convert nHibernate into our own objects

Web Service <= for all external and [internal] calls.

Class to take objects from Web Service and back into our own objects

and then…

Normal nTier application architecture such as Data Transformation Layer, Business layer etc.

Within the database, when we are writing a hierarchy of objects to the database, say for example;

Order

Person

Details Address Product
Other

We need to serialise the object and save it, in its entirety, to an image field in a table. No attempt has been made to store the objects in their own tables so that we can do useful stuff like report on it.

This is an architecture that was implemented [way] before I started and as you can probably appreciate, is a complete nightmare not to mention slow as a wet weekend.

We’re not even allowed to have stored procs within SQL server because in my boss’s last job they had a hundred or so and he had a problem identifying them all so therefore all stored procs are the devil.

Now the same person that developed the above architecture has developed the new one. It came as no surprise that he’s essentially used the same framework only now it’s using DotNet 3.5 with interfaces and generics.

We still have to go through web services, still need to serialise (everything), still not allowed to use stored procs etc. In fact, we’re only barely able to bang two rocks together here.

He says to us that the framework is open for discussion but when you discuss it, unless you approve of his design, you are told flatly “No”. He simply won’t listen to any other suggestions. Even when you show him demo applications of his proposed architecture v’s yours and he can see the speed difference, he still won’t take that on board.

So I guess my question is, and I know others have experienced the same things out there, how do I get through to someone like this? How do you convince someone to ditch Web Services for internal calls and applications? How do you demonstrate, and make it stick, that stored procs are a better way to go than ad-hoc sql statements?

This is killing me. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and I certainly don’t want to write code that I know is going to be slow and cumbersome.

Help!