The decision to buy or build software has been around ever since people started to sell custom software. As many stated in their comments there are some things we have come to expect whenever we make a buy or build decision. One thing that often eludes people is that the total cost of ownership for either method is pretty much […]

Canned products are a reality for most of us in the software industry. Why would you roll your own CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), MRP (Material Requirements Planning) or accounting software when there are many mature products that are configurable for just about anything a business can do? The devil’s advocate would say, “where would we be if Google took that […]

When you merge two sets together you are executing three different queries. Yes, I know some engines support a MERGE command. There are still times you need to roll your own implementation, and it is instructive to know what commands to do, and the order in which to execute them. In the merge process you provide a new set of […]

Today I’m writing about one implementation using the general concept of a service bus to solve writing data transactions to multiple data stores efficiently. The goal is for an application to save data once, and have it routed to multiple destinations reliably, while the application knows nothing about the destinations, and the destinations know nothing other than themselves and their […]

Recently I was reading a blog from Edd Wildter-James as he reflects on the nature of a schemaless database, especially as it is espoused by MongoDb. His central point is that even if your database, or physical data store, does not support enforcement of a schema, that doesn’t mean your database is schemaless. At some layer your application must be […]

Today I want to share another little SQL Style thing. This is really not a big deal, but it has a lot of value when you are debugging things. This style technique is to place aggregated clauses with all the additional criteria on separate lines when writing your SQL Statement. I’ll give you an example, and then tell you how […]

I hate to be tied down with a lot of standards when it comes to developing software. I like to keep things down to a minimum allowing individual creativity and preferences. At the same time, there are a few things I have found which tend to provide value, regardless of the person writing or maintaining the software. Here are a […]

One of my managers in the past shared with me a common pattern in the lifecycle of software development or implementation. We are under great pressure to get things working on the first version. A lot of shortcuts at taken to make things work…we’ll get back to it later when we have more time. Right now, we just need to […]

Recently I went through the exercise of error proofing an application. It called a number of micro-services. Sometimes a micro-service became saturated and non-responsive. The work wasn’t complete yet, and all I really needed to do was wait for the saturation to diminish. Then my work could continue successfully. This is a common problem with many different solutions. The perfect […]

Yesterday we considered optimization of database by reducing the number of looping requests are necessary to fulfill a query. Today I am turning the topic back around to procedural code, where we have a lot more direct control. There are a couple kinds of common loops found in procedural languages. Most of us are quite familiar with a FOR loop […]