Rants

More comment spam

Damian Maclennan — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:39:00 GMT

I just got a few comment spams in my blog. This is fairly common so I usually don’t mind so much.

Except these ones were from ApexSQL Software, formally Lockwood Tech.

Pretty poor form guys, you know SQLTeam sells advertising if you want to announce a new product.

Stored Procedure FUD

Damian Maclennan — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 00:50:00 GMT

I was just chatting to a friend of mine who runs an online business, he was asking me about stored procs because he had been told by two people (including someone who works at the hosting company) that stored procs don't scale!

Apparrently, you can't use them in a cluster or any sort of balanced environment.

Now, obviously this is total BS, has anyone come across this sort of FUD before ? I'd love to know the origin of this.

Area man blames tools for own lack of knowledge.

Damian Maclennan — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 12:24:00 GMT

Sounds like a headline from The Onion doesn't it ?

Something I've mentioned once or twice is my annoyance at people who use the GUI tools that Microsoft supply as an excuse to not know what is actually going along behind the scenes. Then when they hit the brick wall they were heading for by not understanding their toolkit, they rant and rave about how Microsoft is crap, or SQL Server is crap, or HTML is crap, or whatever it is they don't get.

This is a perfect example.

don't log on as sa, dummy

Damian Maclennan — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:29:00 GMT

Phil Scott gives an excellent rundown on why your application shouldn't use the SA account to log in with.

This link might serve you well as a handy page slap next time you see "sa" in a connection string.

Not only that, but very cool use of a Spinal Tap reference in the blog. Way to go Phil!

Software Fashions

Damian Maclennan — Tue, 07 Oct 2003 00:32:00 GMT

An interesting article about fads in software development. Rob will appreciate this :

XML is best at representing data in a clean and open fashion. Anything more is stretching the point, like sticking a saddle on a pig and calling it a micro-horse. Inevitably, books then start to appear that rationalize the industry's madness, such as Micro-Horse Revealed, Micro-Horse Developer's Guide, or Teach Your Micro-Horse to Sing in 21 Days!

Versioning Code

Damian Maclennan — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:04:00 GMT

Why oh why do some developers not feel the need to version stored procedures ?

On a current project I have been watching a developer (who happens to be working on a different project to me) work. He seems like he knows what he is doing, and he is following a bunch of "best practices" like CVS and build tools. However, everytime he works on a stored procedure, it is inside Enterprise Manager!!!!!

Why is T-SQL code treated like a second class citizen by so many people ?. It is equally crucial to the workings of the system, and equally easy to introduce bugs into, yet some people don't see the need to treat it like real code.

I don't even buy the argument that it is easier. Enterprise Manager would have to be the WORST code editing environment in the world, well OK, there is Notepad but you get my point (Don't even get started on that Rob).

Anyone out there that edits stored proc code inside Enterprise Manager, please drop me a comment and tell me why. I'd love to hear a single good reason from the community.