So 2010 is the year of social media. Time’s Person of the Year was the Facebook dude, so that kind of makes it official. I have so many identities spread across all of these communities. How do I manage them all? For now I am taking care of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I suppose those are the prime players. I say that based on the number of people using those sites. I use Facebook for…
A play on words – the Axis of Evil, three countries that foster or promote terrorism. This is not a history lesson or political discussion, go here for that. So what is the Access of Evil? I would propose that the following practices conspire to bring down any well-ordered collection of data: MS Access MS Excel SELECT *. So do I have anything meaningful to add to this discussion at this point, or was I…
For me, it’s leading. If I have a code or syntax problem, I find it easier to see the line missing the comma if I can look at the first char position. Of course you may say that’s crazy, and any reasonable programmer would demand trailing commas. I’m guessing your IDE offers formatting options that allow you to choose what works best for you. A few minutes investing these could save you hours of searching…
No. For several years now I have been an Oracle database dude who eavesdropped on the SQL community. I hoped to pick up the lingo and become savvy enough that I could say “Yes, I do SQL Server.” If I’m being honest, then I must admit I have largely failed. Yes, I understand what people are talking about, I can read the blogs and get what they are saying. But as Robert Heinlein coined in…
Disclaimer: I wrote this before I started working at Oracle. I still believe what I wrote more than 10 years ago, how trippy is that? One of the most dangerous phrases to be uttered in an organization is ‘Oh, we have an Enterprise license.’ Once that gets out, everyone will think they can deploy/use as much as product X as they want. It does not take much of an imagination to realize where this can…
I love books. I remember when my local school system had a partnership (evil plan) with Pizza Hut. For every six books I read, I earned a free personal pizza. I was reading upwards of 10-20 books a month when I was in elementary school. This may have been partly due to me living in a rural area with no local kids my age to play with, but I’ll pretend it was because I was…
A better title might be ‘Tools are Too Cool for School’ or ‘If you don’t use Tools You are Dumber Than a Caveman’ or…well, you get the idea I think. My focus of course falls squarely in the IT and RDBMS domain. It is also not a huge secret that I spend a lot of time advocating a specific database tool for a little independent software company. I want to take a step back this…
Many moons ago, this was a pretty straightforward question. It also had a very easy answer, the DBA owned performance. By that I mean if the database or it’s applications did not perform as expected, it was the DBA who would step in and fix it. Several years ago this began to change. More and more shops started to expect the developers to have more than a passing awareness that their applications relied on a…
Twitter came through for me in a big way again today. I’m constantly being asked why I do ‘the Twitter’, and this experience sums it up nicely. Updated 10-05-2010 First things first. # – denotes a hashtag, useful for finding/categorizing posts on Twitter FTW – acronym for ‘For the Win’, geeky way of saying ‘Woohoo!’ I am an idiot. I recently bought a wiring harness for my car stereo, this was going to let me…
I am continuously chiding my customers to upgrade their software, particularly the software they bought from Quest. Why? Well, for starters it’s in my financial best interest to do so. But, I have no problems sleeping at night because it’s also in their best interest. Why? Companies spend a lot of money on software maintenance renewals. Anywhere from 10-25% of the list price every year goes to this. Software companies love that revenue stream. It’s…