Let's talk about parallel processing, something I prefer to call concurrent processing. It shows up in many places. Most OS's have concurrent processes. Applications like Apache have concurrent threads within a process for handling web requests. Oracle not only handles concurrent queries from multiple users, but you can define a …

The star schema represents data as a table of facts (measurable values) that are associated with the various dimensions of the fact. Common dimensions include time, geography, organization, product and the like. I'm working with some folks whose facts are a bunch of medical test results, and the dimensions are …

NUT. No Unit Test Cases. Need I say more? If there are not unit tests, this isn't real programming.

MCF and NCF. Minimal/No Use of Collections Framework. The MCF defect occurs when someone uses only the Array or Vector classes. The NCF defect occurs when someone uses only primitive …

What I said: "How about using the RDBMS product appropriately ? It's for persistence. Do processing in another product, appropriate for processing: Java."

What it became: "why not use a file system and skip the expense and overhead of an RDBMS ?"

I was shocked that numerous good features of the RDBMS …

It's not that spreadsheets are evil incarnate, it's just that there are so many ways to abuse them. Spreadsheets put a veneer of structure over some information. Bad spreadsheet design, worse yet, puts unstructured information into a hard-to-manipulate format.

I've complained about this before. See Great Quotes about the Spreadsheet …

Some of Cringley's The Truth About IT Consultants is good stuff. His Type "A" and Type "C" are both stories of consultants who are brought in because they have specific skills. In the "A" case, it's a technical skill, and in the "C" case it's project management.

In both cases …

I've seen a couple of recent use case problems. The first recent failure of use cases was particularly alarming. It was a small application; a few use cases, a couple of actors.

One of the actors was labeled as "End User". Seriously. Few labels could be as vague as End …

Processing XML and X12 messages is a struggle. You have a number of use cases (I listed a bunch of features in Synchronicity and Document Object Models ). These can be tackled a number of ways.

What spoils me is the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM …

Message-oriented applications involve an interface defined around messages (or documents). I've been working on applications that involve a fair amount of manipulation of XML and X12. Recently I started yet another, and started to recognize the essential design patterns.

There are four use cases. The first two use cases define …

Some recent thoughts on using Python, directly, as configuration file syntax. In a way, a configuration is a highly-specialized Domain Specific Language focused on the application's problem domain. The point is to leverage syntax we already have to create meaningful configuration files.

"Python is sometimes a good use for a …