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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

CODA: A Noise and Background Reduction Method for Component Detection in Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry

The CODA algorithm has widespread use in the detection of 'real' peaks from noisy MS chromatograms. For example ACD Labs ChromManager and OpenChrom both cite CODA ...Read more

Oracle Execution Plan: Stability or Lability?

From statistics derived from data distribution and hardware performance measurements, and the SQL to be executed, the Oracle Cost Based Optimiser (CBO) is the ...Read more

Tenor Manipulation with LINQ and C#

In financial products, the term tenor has multiple usages but it is commonly it is referred to as the time remaining for a loan ...Read more

SQL Server to Oracle migration – déjà vu 002

Having migrated many systems from SQL Server to Oracle, I used to want to cry when I encounter this type of construct. [code ...Read more

SQL Server to Oracle migration – déjà vu 001

Every time I undertake a project to migrate a system from SQL Server to Oracle, I am reminded how deficient and cumbersome it ...Read more

BDD with Cucumber, and some word-play

During a recent technical interview, I was asked to write: a snippet of code to test whether a string was a palindrome the ...Read more

Can an Oracle database trigger fire more than once during the execution of a single atomic piece of DML?

Here is a bit of Oracle 101 code creating some test data that will be used in the remainder of this blog article, ...Read more

In New Zealand, it’s a quarter to two too

There is a 12 hour difference between New Zealand Standard Time (NZST) and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Bar daylight saving, this is mighty convenient as ...Read more