10 things to review after finishing your data model
When I finish modeling my database, I like to just let it sit a couple days, then spend some time just reviewing it to check for inconsistencies. The kind of inconsistencies you never notice when you’re up to your eyeballs in details, but drive you up the wall after 5 years of maintenance. When I finished my database design a few days ago, I jotted a few things down to remember to do. But when I transcribed them into my bug tracker, where I manage all my tasks, 3 things turned into 5, then 7 and I realized if I could just add a few more, I’d have an infamous ‘Top 10’ list. Anyway here it is. It’s not exactly comprehensive, but it’s a start. 10 things to review after finishing your data model: Naming consistencies Column default consistencies Identity / auto-number technique exists Constraint consistencies Foreign Key relationships exist Indexes on Foreign Key columns Abbreviations are consistent Abbreviations are documented Data type and size consistencies. (For example; TableA.UserName is nvarchar(N), so TableB.UserName should be nvarchar(N) as well, not nvarchar(N±X)) Review all requirements again to reconfirm everything was... read moreHow to enforce a foreign key constraint against multiple tables
How to hook up NUnit as an option in the ASP.NET MVC application wizard
Ben Alabaster and I have started a project, lets call it Project X for now (original eh? ;-). Anyway, we have decided to blog about its development. I will be posting something in the next few days, and Ben just published his first post “How do I hook my version of nUnit into the ASP.NET MVC template?“. Here’s a blurb: If you’ve been looking for a way to integrate nUnit into your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 template – that is, when you create a new ASP.NET MVC application and it asks you if you’d like to create a test project, nUnit shows up in the list along with the usual Visual Studio Unit Test option. There are a number of longwinded ways of doing things. There’s also a relatively simple way touted on the Visual Web Developer Team Blog which I’ll spare you the headache of running it and finding the same problems I did…. Ben’s post can be found on his blog... read moreInvestigating the relationship between estimation accuracy and task size
A very simple Pair Programming IP Rights Agreement
Once in 1998, I sat down with my manager (the only manager I’ve ever had who could program), and we banged out some code for about 2 days. It was a very fast paced synergistic activity where one idea fed another and at the end of 2 days our initial idea morphed into something completely different and a heck of a lot better. Well, tonight 11 years later, I’ve convinced my colleague Ben Alabaster to come over and pair program. I don’t know how it will go, I’ve got high hopes, but I am confident at the end of the night both Ben and myself will be a little better as programmers, and might have even started something worth finishing. But two things I do know: 1) if we come up with something good, we’re both going to want to use it. And 2) if we ever get to the point of needing an agreement outlining our IP rights, it will be too late to draft one. So, Ben & I threw together some basic rules yesterday. Frankly, I’m surprised I couldn’t find any on the net already, maybe I over think this stuff more than most people, or perhaps it’s because I just didn’t look that hard. So here’s what we agreed to: Each of us, individually, is free to use any programming concept shared, discovered, or created. Each of us, individually, is free to use anything we cocreate as part of a larger project with a significant amount of additional functionality. This can be a personal project, business project, or consulting project. Each of us must agree to release any code or binaries either as a commercial product or open source. Each of us will share any credit and/or financial profits equally. I’d love to hear other people’s perspective and comments about this. Copyright © John MacIntyre 2009, All rights... read more11 Personal Programming Assumptions That Were Incorrect
Today I got side tracked and spent an unreasonable amount of time on StackOverflow.com. One of the questions I was looking at was What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect?
Many of the answers immediately resonated with me, like Instantsoup’s answer That people knew what they wanted and JohnFx’s awesome answer about comparing his knowledge to the collective knowledge of all other programmers. Other answers reflected a poor initial understanding of the language or technology, many of these I was fortunate enough to not relate to.
As you can imagine, I immediately started coming up with my own answers, so I continued reading to make sure they weren’t already there. But as I read, I came up with more initial assumptions which proved to be false. I thought I’d pick out the best, and answer with that one, but realized I had a whole blog post!
So without further ado; here is my list of assumptions about programming and the industry which proved to be incorrect: …
read more6 simple steps to a stress free database change deployment
… Deployments can be a real headache at the best of times, but especially when schema updates to a production database are involved. Don’t get me wrong, you usually have a backup to fall back on, but how long will that take to restore? … Really, you don’t want to resort to the restore, have the database offline for that long, or have your name associated to it. So gradually I evolved a process which has kept me sane and confident when deploying schema changes to production servers, even on large, sensitive, and active databases….
read moreHow To Get The Most Frequently Used Column Values
Whenever I import external data, integrate to another database, or am new to a project, I need to get familiar with the database. The table schemas, relational integrity, and constraints are the first thing I look at and take me a long way, but soon I need to know what the data looks like.
In an ideal world, relational integrity and database constraints would define control this, and all I’d really need to do is look at those. But the reality is, in 15 years of working in this industry, most of the databases I’ve worked on, that I didn’t design, have barely used constraints and some haven’t even used relation integrity fully!
The need to get a good feel of the data is even more prevalent when working with dirty data, or when refactoring poorly written applications to ensure any refactoring doesn’t introduce other issues. I will usually wind up writing the following query repeatedly:
….
Senior Software Consultant working in the Toronto area. I specialize in Microsoft technologies and have a long history of taking software development projects from idea, through development and implementation, and years of maintenance.
Always looking for interesting projects. 