Life.Is.Hard.Without.Paladin

I have been maintaining a system in my office for quite sometime now and I have been keeping up with the cumbersome maintenance effort I have to put in whenever there is a slight change in the database schema. Whenever a new business requirement calls for a new column to be introduced in a table, the following steps will need to be performed:

1. Change a minimum of three stored procedures.
2. Change the XSD schema that mapped to the underlying table.
3. Change the parameters in the CRUD methods to make sure the number of parameters match.
4. Change the affected ASP.NET pages that call the CRUD methods to match the parameters.

I also encountered problems with data types. Decimal values in the data-tier were actually VARCHAR types in the stored procedures. Oh Dear!

On closer inspection, the data framework resembles a very old version of Data Access Application Block or DAAB for short (now part of the Enterprise Libray). The ex-developers had developed wrappers over it but I could still identify it through the ExecuteDataset calls. Nice work guys - Frameworks are 95% wrappers and 5% core functionality huh? *GRRrr*

Now, I'm thinking if I should Paladinize the system. With Paladin, I can easily change the database schema and still maintain the integrity among the components. Adding new fields won't break existing pages and I certainly don't have to worry about data types. Also, the BEWizard will help me generate most of the necessary implementation code and I can just focus on the business components. Most importantly, the changes won't crack the system all the way up.

Sigh! Life is so tough without Paladin. :'(