This is actually about a bit more than simply maps. It’s really about what a map is. It’s an abstraction. This may sound obvious, but it’s an important concept.

“I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, ‘E6.” – Stephen Wright

Forget the impracticality of such a map, it makes a fine joke, it’s still just a map. We don’t live on maps.  Piaget and others have done a lot of research into the development of the minds of young children and it’s fascinating. At first, I think one can argue they live in a very solipsistic world. Nothing exists except what they can see or touch. Soon though concepts of object permanence come into being. But they’re still not quite at the concept of true abstraction. At very young ages, if you hold up a picture of a room to a small enough child, they’ll try to grab stuff of the picture. And why not? They can grab things in the physical world.  Soon they start to realize the picture is just that, not the actual room, but a flattened portable version of it.

Around age 5 (I’m going on memory here) we start to ask children to draw maps. It might be a map of their room, or a map of how to get to school. They’re crude and often, to our adult minds wildly inaccurate, but, they’re starting to achieve a truer concept of abstraction.  Their maps aren’t even miniaturized pictures of the real world, they’re completely new, abstract designs of the world.

Eventually, around 8th grade or so, they’re probably introduced to Algebra. Up until then much of their math might have been things like 8 * ___ = 56. They’ll dutifully fill in the 7. It’s a blank, but it’s not really abstract. Then they start to solve problems like “56/x = 8, solve for x”.  Again they’ll write down 7, but now they’ve learned that a letter can represent a number and be used that way later on.

What’s interesting about the above is, many people never stop to realize that * or / or + or many other mathematical symbols are really just abstractions. Yes, numbers are in a sense an abstraction. There’s nothing inherent about the symbol 5 that means it MUST represent five of an object. It’s just a convenience (and it’s shorter than writing ///// hash marks). But the mathematical symbols are even more of an abstraction. If I wrote 8♒︎__ = 56, most of us could probably figure out what ♒︎ represents there.

Anyway, that aside, why am I writing about maps and ultimately abstraction? Because, it is so vitally important to my job and perhaps the jobs of most of my readers and it’s been on my mind lately.

I’ve been working on an SSIS package for a client. The original spec was “Import these 20 or so (out of 240) CSV files out of this ZIP file.”  I thought about it and after teaching myself a bit more about SSIS (I don’t usually do much in it) I realized I could create a container that did most of the work. And I could assign variables to the container. The variables include things like what database connection to use and where the files might be located. And, most importantly, a variable for the NAME of the file/table (by using a table with the same basename as the file, I can use a single variable and line stuff up nicely.) And part of what I had to (re)-learn was the scope of variables within SSIS packages and how to expose the ones I wanted as parameters.

Now, honestly, it probably took me more time to set up this level of abstraction to make it workable than if, for the 20 or so tables I had hard-coded everything.

BUT, I’ve got enough experience to guess at what was coming next; and I’m going to guess you know what’s coming next.

“Hey, this is great, but you know what, we think we want all 240 files in that ZIP file loaded. Can yo do that?”

“Sure!”  And at this point, the problem isn’t the amount of work, it’s the tediousness of it; “create table schema, create a new file connector, copy the SSIS container, update the variable for the table, go in and reconnect the file connect to the new table, test”.  It’s a LOT less work than if I had to hardcode everything by hand.  The container name even automatically is updated based on the table variable. This actually has an unintended, positive side-effect. If for some reason I start to duplicate a container (say I forgot I had already imported table Customer_Val, the container name won’t update using the variable since you can’t have duplicate container names. I caught this very problem the other day. So this was an unintended, but very useful additional side effect!)

And of course, once I move the final code to their UAT environment and then the Prod environment, it’s simply a matter of updating 3-4 variables in the deploy (for the database server, file location and where to set emails) and I’m done.

By taking the time to abstract out as much as I could, I’ve made my life easier. Up front it was definitely a bit more work, but in the long run, has saved me a lot of effort.

Nothing revolutionary about the concept to us developers. BUT, stop and try to think of an environment where maybe variables or such layers of abstraction don’t exist. Such environments exist and there’s some valid reasons for them, but ultimately, being able to abstract stuff can make our lives MUCH easier and our code that much more powerful.

And it appears that abstraction at this level is perhaps the ONE real intellectual advantage we have over other intelligence on this planet. And I’m not even so sure about that!

So I’ll end in pointing out that even the written word is really just a level of abstraction. So this column is about itself. Or something like that.