Individual lookups against a rules system stored in a database can add up to a lot of computations and depending on the size of your ruleset cause delays.  There are ways around this with caching [https://aws.amazon.com/caching/], in memory hashmaps [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table]

Wanted to create a chain of method call backs with some simple JavaScript [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript] as in startMethod -> calls function on success and another function on failure and it had been awhile since I did this refreshed my memory on Promises and

Working on a task to create a relational ordered set of prompts from rules with dynamic model binding.  This is one way to do it with JSON and SQL.  In this case the prompts may change, but it is a rare event.  The goal is to make the SQL server

Again I am fighting with a MySql [https://mysqlserverteam.com/new-defaults-in-mysql-8-0/#:~:text=The%20default%20value%20of%20the,vast%20majority%20of%20MySQL%20users.] collations and character sets.  Why would this be a problem when I have set the default collation and changed all the tables to character set utf8mb4 and collation

Putting this here to remember how to query out the metadata of a view, using the AdventureWorks2017 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/adventureworks-install-configure?view=sql-server-ver15&tabs=ssms] database view vAdditionalContactInfo for reference. use [AdventureWorks2017] SELECT [c].[column_id], [c].[name] AS [ColumnName] FROM [sys].[columns] [c] INNER

Needed to alter a particular stored procedure over a few thousand databases.  Here is an example script that uses a cursor and dynamic sql to do this.  Key point here is to have the USE statement switch the database prior to issuing the CREATE OR ALTER command so that each

Got some quirky unexpected behavior when loading data from text files and SQL [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL] statements when working with extended ASCII [https://theasciicode.com.ar/] characters and Unicode. These files in particular are UTF8 [https://www.utf8.com/] encoded as is standard when doing text editing

In the commit early and often strategy means checking in and commit code all the time like saving a file and sometimes when you do this you accidentally check in something that you shouldn't have and even push it up to the remote server(s) Do this to

User defined functions suffer from inability to be query plan optimized, but this is a nice function I wrote to find ASCII control characters CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ContainsControlCharacters] ( @textToCheck NVARCHAR(MAX) ) RETURNS BIT AS BEGIN DECLARE @invalidCharCount INT; -- Sadness that it came to this -- Splits the input text

Sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control you get garbage in your database.  Optimally you would filter this data out from getting to and residing in your data storage, but decisions are made and things are built to allow for partial mistaken data rather than complete perfect data.  Today I

Was asked an interview whiteboarding question that was using a data graph and to solve two problems.  I don't like whiteboarding sessions [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/19/the-trouble-with-technical-interviews/] as I don't think they have a good application to what software in practice is

What is a Temporal Table [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database]? * A system versioned user table that maintains the entire history of data changes * Introduced SQL:2011, proposed 1992 * Active data table is mirrored by historical mirror table controlled by database Temporal Table Details * Two timestamps columns are required

Most companies have too many rules. They're designed to keep people in line and drive them to produce more. The assumption is that without rules, people would be unmotivated, directionless, and unproductive.  This is insulting, patronizing, and an adversarial attitude to have. Trust, freedom, and autonomy are three

As I was trying to do some database schema cleanup, I needed to scan all databases on a particular server and see if there are any records in the table.  If there were no records this user table is unused and can not be dropped at this point. This approach

Was asked to question as part of an application and I thought it would be good to publicly share and document them for future reference. What is one strong opinion you have about software development that is also strongly held, and why do you hold this opinion? NULL [https://developer.

Had to do some sequential merging of records in sql data and this is one of the few occasions when a cursor is useful and it had been quite awhile since I had written a cursor and refreshed my memory with this. Need to merge records from a table that

Remember: Make a backup every time before upgrading Was writing a blog post and saw that a critical security feature was released for ghost this blog engine and found that my collation again is blowing up the migrations. Ghost blog people fix this shit by establishing a script to do

Did a copy/paste and accidentally stumbled onto the option enhancer that I had not remembered using before Example: Command+C Start with a simple command+c operation copy command I do all the time, but now in the paste target press Command+Option+V and you get in my

Came across a data situation where a previous decision to allow 1-N [https://www.relationaldbdesign.com/database-design/module6/three-relationship-types.php] matching for a parent->child table relationship [https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/142138/best-practice-for-parent-child-relation] was now unecessary and had led to confusion on data matching because the availability to

Tried to open a link in the command line, but was unable to because terminal did not recognize chrome [https://www.google.com/chrome/] as a registered binary to handle and open urls. Experimentation Tried to do this: chrome http://google.com Error was: zsh: command not found: chrome Ok,

Upgrading to the latest version of 3.X was no problem, but then moving from 3.X to 4 everything blew up because of database schema changes with messages like this A GhostError occurred. Message: Ghost was able to start, but errored during boot with: alter table `members_status_events`

Open Source, it forms the basis of most personal and commercial software with no sign of a decrease in adoption or change in it's practical use.  At <Company> there is no project or solution that I have heard of or examined that does not use or

Previously a design choice was made to store raw JSON [https://www.json.org/json-en.html] responses in a table asVARCHAR(MAX) [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/char-and-varchar-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15] field.  As the person coming in afterwards to understand and debug the problem this was a pain

Sometimes you want to test a query being unable to access a table that is part of a query (suppose you are using an ORM [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object%E2%80%93relational_mapping] like Entity Framework [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/] <- which sucks ) and a

Preface: Covid19 [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html]is a unique situation that gives opportunity to embrace successful distributed work.  With over eight plus months of resounding success to distributed work for the company with expectations meant and exceeding even the optimistic forecasts, I would like to propose