If you pay attention to product marketing today one of the things you may notice is that they are constantly inventing new problems for which they can sell you a solution. Maybe that isn’t quite fair. Many times they are simply inventing new terms to describe problems that already exist. At the end of the day, we end up with […]
Author: Ben Taylor
Are Smart Phones Really Smart?
I have a contract with my children regarding the use of their electronic devices. One of the things in our contract says that we will maintain transparency. I have the right (and responsibility) to look at their activity online. To be fair, they have the same right with my devices; true transparency is a two way street. I tell you […]
Are New Departmental Apps Better?
I had been looking at MS LightSwitch as a modern application creation tool thinking it might be a better solution than using previous tools such as MS Access. By the way, I still think Access has its place in the world. Back to LightSwitch. One of the reasons I was looking at it in a more positive way was the […]
When the Business Can’t Wait-Your Too Late!
I’ve seen many different systems that began as a solution for an immediate need. All of them were based on a simplified, integrated programming platform that encapsulated the storage engine and the user experience. In short, it was often used like a glorified spreadsheet with limited understanding of how applications are designed. There were a lot of issues that resulted […]
Keeping Up With The Business
One of the things that frequently happens in a business is that it is moving faster than the groups that support it. Back in the early ‘90s I worked on a seed data warehouse that was started by a scientist working in seed design for a farm co-op. His skill was not in database design or applications. He knew how […]
Join the Union
When working with sets there are a lot of ways to transform them using the SQL language. One of the things we often do with sets is to combine two or more into a single set. Perhaps you have a query based on some value, and another query based on a completely other value. Now you want to get the […]
Migrations for the Masses
I have talked a lot about database migration scripts allowing you to promote database schema changes from one environment to another with reliability. Because this task is daunting, there have been a number of tools built around the process to simplify it for you. Depending on the tool, they may not migrate data as seamlessly as they do schema modifications. […]
Working With Obsolescence
Reading Stephen’s editorial, “Check Out Any Time You Lilke…” reminds me of software patterns intended to help reduce the feeling of being tied to a specific technology. The reality is that it is very difficult to future proof anything. You can loosely couple, inject, micros kernel and much more, and still have dependencies you can’t walk away from. I do […]
A Walk Down Memory Lane
I’m not coming up with a great topic for today, so I thought I would share a few of the many relational database engines I have used over the years. I started working with relational database engines while I was in college. I took a course for relational databases that used engines running on the old DEC PDP-11 computers called […]
Sharding Instead of Partitions
Yesterday we talked about partitioned tables. The goal was to spread the load over multiple resources allowing for large amounts of data to be live and responsive at the same time. Spreading data over multiple tables allows the data to be stored in the most optimized state with the least amount of overhead. It also improves disaster recovery. Using partitioned […]