Stories from 2017

Shall I write a mock, shim, stub, ….? I will opt for none of them thank you

I have a licensed third party API, it cost my company around 7,200€, and it was provided as part of an integration layer ...Read more

German and .NET System.Globalization.CultureInfo – string sorting, it is obvious, now

Sometimes when programming, you have to check your sanity by writing a small test application to confirm what you think should be expected ...Read more

Database Table Partitioning – Why?

There are not two common reasons why RDBMS DBA's partition database tables, but five. The two rote answer reasons usually cited for implementing ...Read more

MongoDB as a DNA Typing Database (SGMPlus?)

Is MongoDB up to the job of being able to query a database of ca. 10,000,000 SGM Plus DNA profiles and laboratory samples? ...Read more

Pay up or we’ll release a porn video of you. Only US$300

OK, firstly this blog post is a general IT rant, left field of my normal rants, and atypical of my normal technical and business ...Read more

MongoDB – A very humbling first experience

I need a MongoDB database populated with some test data - a handful of small thumbnail images and a few other fields for ...Read more

C# String Interpolation, and Expressions, used in a way I have never encountered before

When reviewing other developers' code, I often see small constructs that I would never write myself, yet pause thinking for a moment, "I must ...Read more

There are times when I think Oracle is not for the experienced hand and that I have lost my touch

Why do I keep falling into the same man traps? Why can I not learn? Why do I put myself through the same debugging exercise ...Read more

Some scribbles detailing various SQL approaches for retrieving versioned data

A common theme in home-rolled retrofitted database data history versioning implementations is the presence of a table column within a database table named, ...Read more

We’ve been successfully writing our technical documentation the same way for the past 35 years, we are a NASDAQ listed organisation with profit and growth year on year, our model works, we are perfect, we are not changing, …..; f**k you and your new fangled ideas and fads

Some online technical documentation, and from leading software vendors, is atrocious; old-school railroad diagrams, pages and pages of drivel, and lacking in example code ...Read more