Ian Kelly (1/6/2009)

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When you write documentation and only then the code you are not writing it twice - the code should be a translation of the documentation. I have been...

I created and maintain what amounts to the corporate database backbone system we used for everything from dispatch to accounting to management and data entry.

It's about 100,000 lines of code...

I doubt our company would ever consider outsourcing, simply because of security concerns. However, the point about not upgrading because of application breaking needs to be addressed.

Best practice is to...

Biometrics have lots of problems. Even assuming the data is read-only secure (by which I mean someone can't substitute their fingerprints for yours, or yours for some known criminal!) you...

It's funny because it's true... 🙂

But, alas, it must be said: Shades of Terry Childs...

If you deploy 36 times in one week it means (assuming your coders are coding and testers are testing 24/7) you're deploying every 4.6 *hours*.

Even with scripting languages that's...

"In the US in the last couple weeks we've seen a recession potentially turn into a depression."

No. We aren't *in* a recession, much less a depression. The cowards of wall...

Quite frankly trusting the internet with your business data is insane.

By necessity the only third-party data service I trust with my data is ADP payroll--and only because everyone is...

Prime example of "challenging" software: Toad Data Modeller. 🙂

I love this program, I hate this program. It does let me visually layout my database (essential), it does generate correct SQL,...

As far as windmills being green, well, not so much. Apparently there are problems with bats as well as birds, apparantly bats' lungs explode in the low pressure areas around...

Eliminating stored procedures to do simple CRUD, ok. Eliminating stored procedures for *everything*? Disaster.

The single most important aspect of stored procedures is (when called from triggers or constraints) they are...

Technically speaking RAND() is only pseudo-random, thus it is by definition always deterministic.

Now, if the question were "Does the RAND() function create a fixed series of numbers only when a...

I used to work for a consulting company that was certificate crazy. They thought it impressed the customers to have all their employees dripping with certificates.

That company went belly up...

I've...

Here at work I'm not "an IT guy" I'm *the* IT guy. 🙂

Because there's no one else. I do everything from replacing mice to architecting our primary backbone application.

I don't...

What skills does a developer who's also the DBA need? How about these? (listed in order of importance)

Skill #1:

How to design a database properly! If you're the DBA *and* the...