There are a number of necessary skills for being an architect. Here's a list of four that occurred to me as I tried to piece together a coherent thought from a flurry of emails.

• Summarize.
• State A Goal.
• Know The Technology.
• Manage Your Investment In Learning.

These aren't sufficient skills …

A stored procedure isn't really very easy to understand. There's a profound fascination with triggers and stored procedures, and they're both really bad ideas. I can't say enough bad things about stored procedures. See PL/SQL vs. Java - Which is REALLY faster? and Over-Solving the Problem or When your architect …

Much of the work called "Business Analysis" conflates business problem discovery and technical meddling. I draw a firm line between the discovery part of analysis and the non-discovery (or design) part. Discovery is all about managing ignorance; this can be ignorance of the business need or ignorance of the available …

Python is Batteries Included ™ programming. These analysis tools are either Python Out Of the Box , or they are straight-forward downloads of other open-source components.

Here are some analytical situations where Python has saved my bacon. I'll present some code for several of these.

1. Legacy Data Domains. There are legacy (in …

Here's a simple graphic application which is built on the graphicApp.py framework. This isn't a beginner's hello world. This is the final project kind of program, and only for a student with some trigonometry background. The basic trig isn't too complex, but would require rather detailed documentation to motivate …

Background.

The suggested environment for learning to program using graphics instead of text was LiveWires . This includes a curriculum and associated product, making it a tidy package.

There are a number of alternatives, however.

• Python includes tkinter , section 20.1 of the Python Library Reference, v2.5.
• Python includes turtle …

Physical Tuning.

"...databases can be tuned by creating appropriate indexes, removing others, modifying the physical database schema to suit the most common types of queries, etc. So it isn't clear whether the PL/SQL figure could be better if the database was optimised by a good DBA."

While a good …

While the question of speed came up recently, it ties in to a long-standing position of mine. I ran some realistic benchmarks, and I'm much happier with my architecture now.

Background.

Years ago, at a Siebel conference, I heard a heretical comment. Specifically, they use the RDBMS as simple, flat …

Some additional Sugar notes recently appeared in "Plumbing Life's Depths ".

After attending PyCon, I polished up my GTK environment, reloading the current releases. Here's what I did to get a workable PyGTK on my various desktops.

The GTK Technology Stack

Here's an overview of the components of this stack:

1. GLIB …

Actually, the code looks like a clever expansion on my example, in PyCon 2007 (Revised) .

"But wait," you say. "Creating a pivot table in Python?"

Of course. Spreadsheets can create pivot tables from dimensionally normalized data. However, getting the data in this form is often challenging and if there is …