Manda QoP

Last week I trundled along to a full day event covering various aspects of Oracle DB schemas, indexing and database optimisation. Why did I do this? From a personal point of view I like to understand SQL from all the different viewpoints. I spent 2 years as a Sybase developer, I am currently studying for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 exams and have recently been focusing on performance tuning and maintaining indexes in MS SQL. I was curious what sort of differences, if any, there would be between the Oracle and MS optimisation practices. Quite a lot it seems. I was expecting to find more similarities than differences, so was mildly surprised by what I heard. For the intial stages, Oracle and MS devs are in agreement. 1. Before you start coding, implement a strategy for handling errors that all the developers/DBAs will adhere to. Try..Catches that developers add willy nilly are not a strategy. You need to ensure that errors are captured, reported, handled correctly, and tha...

We were having one of the usual random discussions at work today, you know the kind, conversations that start off relatively normally, degrade into utter cobblers and then go off at weird tangents and you end up discussing cycle powered internet. Overview In order to surf the Internet, staff members need to use the pedal attachment on their PC to generate surfing minutes. Plus points Less work for IT Support as they no longer need to monitor every little thing and add anything remotely interesting to the insanely restrictive proxy. You think I’m joking? I tried to open google.co.nz the other day and got a message about it being banned because it was Arms and Weaponry. What the ???? There are no restrictions other than for rudey and/or illegal stuffs, so staff can check Hotmail if they want to… woo hoo… Increases fitness Allows bosses to easily see who is surfing the internet instead of working through the following easy to spot methods:  Massive increase in calf mus...

Weird things with dates I have a simple sql script that extracts raw data from a quality centre database and extracts it to an excel spreadsheet, part of this is shown below: SELECT bg_bug_id as DefectID, bg_detection_date as RawDetectionDate, convert(varchar(10), bg_detection_date, 103) as FormatDetDate, bg_closing_date as RawClosingDate, convert(varchar(10), bg_closing_date, 103) as FormatCloseDate FROM BUG The issue I'm having is with the formatted dates. Some come through correctly and are left justified with the correct date, the others come through in US format and are right justified. When looking at the excel cell format, the left justified correct dates are showing as General format, and the incorrect right justified dates are Date format. Yes, I could just do the formatting on the RawDate in Excel which guarantees the correct date, and yes I could do some fancy malarky casting to a string and then back to a date but that...

Now those of you who know me well will know that I love maths, I can spend hours and hours playing around with equations and figures and formulae, however a friend (http://rocko.co.nr/) told me at the weekend about the Monty Hall Problem and this one got me right in the logic chip. My first reaction to this was ‘that can’t be right, it doesn’t make mathematical sense’. It is a very counter intuitive problem and one that has caused much debate over the years if my googling on the subject is anything to go by. The problem for those of you who don’t know it: "Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the other doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, 'Do you want to pick door No. 2?' Is it to your advantage to take the switch?” Ref: http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.htm...

SQL Saturday in Auckland went really well on Saturday. Huge thank you to everyone who attended and especially to Dave Dustin for pulling it all together. On Saturday I re-presented the 15 minute certifications talk. As the last time this was presented was November 2008, there were quite a few changes. The ppt slides have been updated to reflect the changes since Nov 2008 and the latest version has been uploaded. Let me know if you have any questions on any of the presentations or white papers.

One of the hardest things for me as a geek is forcing myself to walk past shiny new games with large pink SPECIAL OFFER PRICE stickers on them. Please supermarkets, don’t put cut price games on the way to checkouts where you can ensnare sun-starved and fragile geeks. Point in question, yesterday I went into the big red shed to buy a printer for the office and only through sheer willpower managed to come out without Wii Fit Plus, C&C 4 and the new God of War game. I’m getting better at walking past these evil stands of money grabbing games, though yesterday I did pick up C&C 4 and start walking towards the checkout before thinking twice. I stopped myself, turned round taking out some teenagers with my umbrella (quite by accident – it was a comic turn the Marx brothers would have been proud of) and put the game back on the shelf. If I’d bought it there would have been that wonderful rush of instant gratification that comes from buying something new and shiny but I know that...

If you're one of those people who uses Google for email, searching for internet stuffs and looking at their house on Google Earth, then it's time to do a bit more wandering around the Google site. Did you know that there are LOADS of other things going on with Google? Have a bit of a browse around their site one evening whilst you're having a surf and you could find all sorts of cool little gadgets. Google have made their code easy and freely available which means there are lots of people are out there creating cool gadgets and applications just for the fun of it, for example, the following: - Kick it old school with a game of snake in Gmail by using a certain ctrl key function. - Move the chat box to the right side of the Gmail inbox - See an email time in the sender's time zone - Enable Mail Goggles to stop you from drunken emailing - Send an SMS using the chat gadget - which I need to test to see if it works in NZ as this could be quite useful dontchaknow All th...