David,

>
> Quotas help because, in a larger shop, personality politics often
> overrides common sense. A quota is a hard, system measured rule that
> cannot be "spun" in a meeting, and that can (must) be dealt with before
> submitting work for pre-production peer reviews.

Ah, you're looking for the system to take over the problem of managing
programmers... I've always found it more effective to develop a culture
of competition for performance, rather than saying whatever you do,
however simple or hard, must run in 737 milliseconds. Of course, you
could lurk in your DBA/Manager lair, tweaking quotas for individuals
depending on the performance you want for particular queries they're
working on... Sounds kind of fun, actually, gradually raising the bar
as the query begins to meet the old goals... You could probably code up
something that used the execution time of one run to automatically lower
the quota for the next... Hmmmm

>

Regards,


Ann