Who would win in a fight? A bear or a wolverine? A shark or an elephant? These answers and much more here. Make sure to check out the “old school Pipeline” link for important background information.
Starting with release 10g, Oracle is phasing out Long fields. I have two words about this: Thank God! Long fields are an ETL nightmare. You can’t use any string functions on them. The OLEDB/ODBC drivers can’t read them.
If you’re a PeopleSoft developer and you’re thinking about creating a LONG field, ask yourself if it’s really worth the headache you’re creating for everybody down the road. Is VARCHAR2(4000) adequate? Is that one in a thousand case really important enough to justify all the extra time it will take extract this data out in the future? If the answer is yes, get with the times and use CLOB instead.
Incidentally, Microsoft has followed the leader and is depreciating text and ntext data fields in SQL 2005. They have replaced them with VARCHAR(MAX).
The NYT has a good piece about the economics of airlines providing WiFi on their planes. I am not exactly a seasoned traveller. I’m one of the people who hold up the security checkpoint because I’m never sure what to do before I am told.
That said, when I travel, which is usually for leisure, it always surprises me how unwired the airlines and airports are. I get frustrated at the lack of WiFi and I’m not even working! The technology is there — Boeing has been putting a lot of weight behind it since 2001 — but the airlines don’t see the money in it.
Does anybody else thinks this seems short-sighted? If say, United, had WiFi on their planes, wouldn’t you go out of your way to book a flight on United versus their competitors? Moreover, the airlines are losing money like crazy anyway, what’s another half-million to fit your planes with WiFi?
This seems to happen all the time: somebody writes some bad SQL on our SQL Server box and all the sudden our tempdb grows to the point where it’s taking up an entire job.
Solution: create a job that checks the file size of tempdb. If it reaches a certain threshold, run the following command:
use tempdb
dbcc shrinkfile(tempdev,2048)
Best to run the job in off-hours, if you know what I mean.
My potato has sportingly agreed to come out to the Bob Mould show next Wednesday at First Ave. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there. I’m looking forward to actually being able to see the stage now that they’re smoke-free.
Bob shares his thoughts about his new album this week in the AV Club.
Tags: Music
If you work with SQL — especially with Oracle — and you don’t read Ask Tom, you are missing a goldmine of tips and tuning advice. In the words of my former colleague Andy, “That Tom guy’s the shit.”
The best part of it is that Oracle pays him just to put his tips on the web, so we developers benefit. No login or payola required. Way to put developers first Oracle! Maybe Informatica could learn a few lessons from this.
Sometimes the best performance tips are those you don’t even think about. When to use UNION or UNION ALL. Most people will just use UNION unless they really need all the rows returned. You need to change this thinking. Use UNION ALL unless you know you need the duplicates filtered. Tom lays it out.
I have never worked with Flash, Fireworks, or any of the other Macromedia offerings that many of my colleagues have used. The data and performance have always been much more interesting to me.
But I have always kept on top of new MS offerings, and their new UI development tool — code named “Sparkle” — blows my mind.
Tags: WIMP