I found college courses outside the CS degree program useful, particularly those in the business realm.  A course in Logistics was highly beneficial, as well as statistics which helped with...

I graduated in 1981 with a degree in CS; it was relatively new degree within the Math department at the university.  (I believe a similar experience to Aaron Cutshall.)  Programming...

The best definition I've read about what Love is is, "a conscience decision to value someone else more than you value yourself."  I believe the kinds of Love (Philleo, Storge,...

Are we moving toward a lower trust society?  I think the bigger question is are becoming less virtuous as a society?  Our government It seems is finding it necessary to...

I work mainly on the DW side of the business, providing data for business data analysis. What we have found with the business is that with promotions, moves, and...

I think documentation starts in design. Pick meaningful and concise table / column / database object names. For instance, order number maybe too generic; is it a sales,...

Looking back over my work life there is much I regret. I now realize all the 60+ hour work weeks were not worth it. My wife asked me early in...

Developing employees to have more business knowledge, have them mentored by more experienced individuals, training them in design and architecture skills, etc. would produce a great deal more productivity, produce...

Another productivity tool?  Sometimes seems we live in a techno world focused more upon tools instead of actually solving business challenges.  I know it all comes down to how an...

Also, our DW tables contains calculated / transformed data that does not exist in the Oracle source.  So our ETL logic can be somewhat complex for determining some things based...

Our source system is Oracle.  Data is going into a SQL Server data warehouse.  Being a large corporation with multiple divisions operating on a single instance of Oracle means methods...

We had a need to track the changes happening to an order over time (some of our orders can be active for years). There were many columns of the source...

I have developed somewhat of a balance over the years, but probably not a perfect one.  I used to work a great deal of overtime generally for no extra pay...

We built a database re-sync between 2 servers (utilizing linked server) using a stored procedure. The procedure uses a cursor to walk through a list of tables and uses the...

For cases where I don't really care what columns have changed, only care that the row has changed, I use checksums with the load and base tables to identify changed...