Aaron, from Data Specialists, finds the question, “Can my software be tested?” to be valuable in their product line. Aaron writes in response to the editorial "A Question to Improve Your Code": I am in 100% agreement with you on the impact testing has had on the quality of the code I write. In fact a current college student interviewed […]

Is it testable? That single question has impacted my software writing more than just about any other software development strategy. If the tests are automated it is even more important to me. The impact of writing testable code has many facets: If you want to write automated tests efficiently you have to keep the testable methods simple in order to […]

Too many times when things don’t work the way we want them to we “Fix the Symptoms, not the cause”. Usually the symptom is slow performance. Today I’ll share a few war stories. One application I designed was used to manage funds and the fund distributions. The database was nicely normalized. I had a user that wanted to see everything […]

Over-engineering is always a possibility in any application. In the last few months I have seen a number of different examples of over-engineering. I find it interesting that they all have one thing in common. The application had poor performance and therefore wouldn’t scale to handle the load. Instead of addressing the core cause the systems were resolved using a […]

As I have been watching the startup of new projects using the Dot Net stack it looks like Silverlight is being replaced with MVC or MVVM based on HTML5 capabilities. I’m not saying one is better or worse, or even making capability comparisons. Moreover, Silverlight has more capabilities in older browsers in those situations where installing a client tool is […]

SQL Server introduced the XML data type in 2005 as a native storage for XML documents. Because it is truly XML aware, it validates any XML saved to make sure it is correctly formed. It has additional benefits if you provide a schema, assuring that the xml is not only well formed, but conforms to the specified schema. Additionally, the […]

Old habits die hard; at least for me that is true. I find that I am still using the old DateTime data type, even though other options were introduced in SQL Server 2008 resulting in equivalent, more, or less precision while using less memory in some cases. Susan Ibach did a nice blog a few years ago breaking out some […]

Maurice shares another relational database anti-pattern. I saw a case where a table had rows with a single meaning from business rules. They extend the application and add a type to the row for new business cases. The table became very complex to query, since there was alternate rows for the original business case. In the beginning getting the most […]

Recently I encountered a database design intended to reduce the load on a relational database that actually had the reverse impact. The problem was a parent child relationship having a 1 to 1 or many relationship. Normally you would use two tables. You would have a parent table and a child table, containing a foreign key to the parent table. […]

In any database in order to have consistency it is important to have one ultimate source of truth. Many times we want to have that data in different forms. So, do we maintain the data in different forms, or derive it from a single form? For example, you have data in relational tables in a database. You wish to see […]