Here's how to recognize a Faerie Dust request:

1. We have identified a problem. It can be with almost anything: scalability, reliability, auditability, any Quality Measure.
2. We're pursuing a specific technology. Typically, something that has the lowest impact on our architecture.
3. We can't address anything other than this specific technology variation …

I've been trying to help some folks who have a "search" algorithm that's slow.

They know it's slow -- that's pretty obvious.

They're -- unfortunately -- sure that asyncio will help. That's not an obvious conclusion. It involves no useful research. Indeed, that's a kind of magical thinking. Which leads me to consider …

Something I forget to think about is the degree of detail or granularity of design patterns. I have my own viewpoint and I often assume that others share it.

Here's a quote from an email describing the PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programs) patterns as quite distinct from the Gang of …

Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect Great article in Scientific American on this.

I didn't realize that sometimes I do spend time trying to defeat the Einstellung effect. Not a lot of time. But some time.

When confronted with gnarly design problems, I have the same bad habits …

While wrestling with Python's shelve module, I ran across ACID. Interesting thoughts. Plus what appears to be the related Tumblr blog: python sweetness. Also interesting. Not sure I can make heavy use of it right now, but it's helpful to see the thought process. I find the subject of shelve …

Here's a pretty simple set of use cases for a code-kata database application.

This is largely transactional, not analytical.

It's a simple inventory of ingredients, recipes and locations.

We're struggling with our Relational Schema. We're not alone, of course, everyone struggles with the relational model. The technology imposes difficult limitations and we work around them.

There's kind of a 4-step process through which the relational schema erodes into irrelevance. The concept of a schema is not irrelevant. It's …

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

I got an email with hundreds of words of content. This part made sense: "...doing wild card searches using Oracle's database engine and are wondering why is it so slow and how do they make it …

About once a week a question shows up on Stack Overflow that involves loading a database with truly epic volumes of data. For example "billions of rows in a single table for a month".

Billions of rows per month is a minimum insert rate of 385 row per second.

Also …