I work with a CIO who calls the DBA's "The Data Cartel". They control the data. Working with some DBA's always seems to turn into hostage negotiation sessions.

The worst problems seem to arise when we get out of the DBA comfort zone and start to talk about how the …

The question of "Stored Procedures and Triggers" comes up fairly frequently.

Over the years (since the 90's, when stored procedures were introduced to Oracle) I've learned precisely how awful a mistake this technology is.

I've seen numerous problems that have stored procedures as their root cause. I'll identify just a …

I find that some people spend way too much time doing "meta" programming. I prefer to use someone's framework rather than (a) write my own or (b) extend theirs. I prefer to learn their features (and quirks).

Having disclaimed an interest in meta programming, I do have to participate in …

Had a knock-down drag-out fight with another architect recently over "status" and "priority".

She claimed that the backlog priority and the status where the same thing. I claimed that you can easily have this.

Priority: 1, Status: Not Started

Priority: 2, Status: In Process

Priority: 3, Status: Completed

See? It's …

I cannot believe that people still consider top-down, uni-dimensional, taxonomic hierarchies useful.

This Stack Overflow question (REST: How to Create a Resource That Depends on Three or More Resources of Different Types?) repeats an assumption. Essentially the confusion comes from assuming that "URI's map directly to a hierarchy".

I think …

A Gentle Reader provided references to folks who are distrustful of prepared statements.

See "Prepared Statements, Musings " and "Prepared statements are dead, long live prepared statements ".

In "musings" we're told "...users do not clean up/close unused prepared statements." For this reason, they're bad, and should be avoided. Eventually, "...unless …

First, look at "Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL ". Okay, a longish article on the ins and outs of installing something that blah blah blah

Wait -- what? GreenSQL is a proxy for MySQL that checks the SQL for certain kinds of injection attacks!?!?!

Now read Twisted …

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 …

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 …