tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54457666040965695962026-03-26T15:37:06.179-07:00Being mindful of best practices in software development fundamentals can be more effective than adopting every latest technology.Bill Karwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13004667086865377598noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5445766604096569596.post-75567701311889818972012-11-20T17:24:00.001-08:002014-11-24T09:40:20.798-08:00

While I was in college, a friend of mine complained that he was confused while programming in C, struggling to learn the syntax for pointers. He gave the example of something like: *x=**p++ being ugly and unreadable, with too many operations layered on each other, making it hard to tell what was happening.  He said he had done a bit of programming with assembly language, but he wasn't

Bill Karwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13004667086865377598noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5445766604096569596.post-64024706957236247022010-03-24T13:55:00.000-07:002010-03-24T14:35:40.398-07:00

I got a comment from a reader about the Naive Trees section of my presentation SQL Antipatterns Strike Back. I've given this presentation at the MySQL Conference & Expo in the past.I'd also like to mention that I've developed these ideas into a new book, SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming. The book is now available in Beta and for pre-order from Pragmatic

Bill Karwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13004667086865377598noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5445766604096569596.post-19800701212827541382009-05-21T15:05:00.000-07:002016-01-04T20:48:46.190-08:00

Photo by Mike Gogulski, used in accordance with the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license The photo above illustrates (by counter-example) an important characteristic of a normalized database: each logical "type" of attribute belongs in a separate column. Just because three values happen to be numeric doesn't mean it makes sense to SUM() them together. But if dissimilar attributes are

Bill Karwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13004667086865377598noreply@blogger.com118tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5445766604096569596.post-73501851661637541472008-05-23T12:55:00.000-07:002008-05-28T10:33:05.819-07:00

I've been reading a few blog postings such as Kore Nordmann's ActiveRecord sucks and Mike Seth's ActiveRecord sucks, but Kore Nordmann is wrong.ActiveRecord is fine.  It is a tool that does just what it's designed to do.  What sucks is when developers try to make it do other things than what it's intended to do.I worked for Zend, managing the Zend Framework project through its 1.0 release.  I

Bill Karwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13004667086865377598noreply@blogger.com58