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Junk DNA – Junk Oracle, part 0000001

Not so many years ago, junk DNA was thought of as the DNA remnants from some evolutionary path, perhaps where we had fewer ...Read more

Oracle MERGE: Elegantly updating to a sequential version number

It is often important to have a sequential version number (or other value such a credit note or invoice number) associated with piece of ...Read more

C# Often Surprises Me, part: 000001

The C# specification is clear, the language documentation second to none, and there are few surprises about language behaviour or .Net framework on a ...Read more

Oh I really do wish computers could add

Oh I really do wish computers could add, and multiply, and ... [code language="c"] float H = 1.00794; float S = 32.065; float ...Read more

I have an idea how I can get away with premeditated murder (from a DNA typing perspective)

In a recent DNA typing project, I was again 'swabbed' and my DNA profile determined and loaded up into a Country/National DNA database as an ...Read more

Oracle MERGE: Elegantly updating KVP lookups in a database

Storing key-value-pair (KVP) look-up information in a database is pretty routine stuff. There's normally a simple table with a key and a value, as ...Read more

In excess of 96% compound purity/Code test coverage

The Chemistry Bit I recently attended a lecture where a commercial organisation proffered their nous in designing and developing lead-compound kinase libraries. It was ...Read more

(String) letter frequency in LINQ

How would you determine the frequency of letters in a string using C#? If your mind naturally wandered down some abstruse solution involving loops ...Read more

1NF and preservation of database result-set ordering through a database driver

According to the basics of relational theory, and specifically First Normal Form (1NF), a relation is unordered. Put another way, in theory there ...Read more

ANSI SQL/Foundation

I have believed for some time that the SQL FROM clause is optional, that is optional from the standpoint of ANSI/IEC/ISO standards, not from ...Read more