Stories from 2017

PostgreSQL Recursive Common Table Expression WITH Currywürste – My First Development Experience with PostgreSQL

My mother tongue is Oracle, not PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL however has exceptionally good press for being a snappy comprehensive quality product, and with great documentation to boot. ...Read more

Sorry – 2TB of data is sooooooooo much disk space!

2 TB, or 2 terabytes, or 2,000,000,000,000 bytes is sooooooooo much disk space, of course you can't have a clone of of the ...Read more

Multibit Variable Width Encoded Datatypes – Questions To Myself

As some errors made by programmers are so blindingly obvious, you do not need to check whether the code would even, for example, compile! ...Read more

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17 – Of course!

I am likely to be proved wrong. Last year I blogged that the next major version of Oracle might be version 13. It is not an unreasonable ...Read more

Yet another gripe from a Software Developer: I really do wish people wouldn’t “Help Me Out”

Kevin Bacon is one cool dude. From his performances in The River Wild and Footloose, to the unforgettable Hollow Man, he constantly exudes ...Read more

The struggle of Software Requirements: Mass Spectrometry EIC Peak Aggregation vs. Time

Software developers have to endure many recurring frustrations. One of my pet hates is having to trawl through software requirement documents bloated out with ...Read more

Oracle Recursive With With Currywürste

At the age of 53 I have discovered the currywurst, a most delicious fast food found all over Germany. This food needs to be commercially ...Read more

UML in Software Development – how to not be taken seriously

Last week I received a requirements document that contained 42 pages of UML Use Case Diagrams. The document was useless - page after page after ...Read more

When you have to resort to statistics, you know it’s time to redesign the software, or throw it away!

Yesterday the system was running fun. Today it is slow. What changed? How many times has this damn question been asked? The answer is ...Read more

German Verb Conjugation

I am lead to believe that the key to learning a new language, once you have the foundations, is to find a topic that you ...Read more