I’d love to be able to outsource, but in the dynamic world of software development, the person you outsource to needs to be proactively thinking about all situations, they need context, and be focused on quality. And quite frankly, …

Over the first decade of my programming career, one trend became very obvious to me. I noticed that I could always increase my efficiency dramatically in the 11th hour before a deadline. It took about a long time to see (a decade), but I finally saw the truth…

… and with this, my rational mind kicked in and argued that as an ‘Entrepreneur’, isn’t this exactly what I was supposed to be doing? Trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, while minimizing my costs? Isn’t that what business is all about? Isn’t this providing the customer more value faster? Maybe this is the way to go! Think about it; StarBucks is praised for quadrupling the price of a cup of coffee by adding foam … foam! … Air with a thin milk film separating the $5.00 air from the free air. How is it StarBucks is praised for selling foam, while what I described above is clearly wrong? To be honest, I had a very tough struggle with this …

… I do enjoy blogging, and plan to continue. I’ve got a ton of great ideas and thoughts I want to share. But basically, I appear to be in the ‘Finding Your Voice’ phase. Over the next couple months, I may try a few different styles, and see which one is the most effective. By effective I mean; first and foremost delivering real value …

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:
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