puttin’ on my work hat
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Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
via Whitespace.
Tags: digression
A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for…
Inventor: Ming-Jen Wang
Assignee: LSI Logic Corporation
Primary Examiner: John Breene
Secondary Examiner: Cheryl Lewis
via Linked list – Google Patent Search.
Do I have to pay royalties for my homework in 1979?
Compared to the physical world, one of the online world’s benefits is that items can live in multiple locations. Because websites can classify products and other content along multiple dimensions, they help users navigate locally to related items and provide faceted winnowing of a large product space into manageable shortlists that can satisfy the user’s main requirements.
via Top-10 Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
From Ian Smith, Rdb Engineering
RENAME TABLE renames the metadata but leaves the old name as a synonym so that triggers, constraints, stored procedures, default, computed by, automatic as, views, etc continue to run. This synonym is required, and should only be deleted if you know there are no dependencies (the simplest of tables). So this is probably not the tool for you.
Instead I’d suggest defining a synonym for use by applications and other definitions. Then you can switch the synonym from one table to the other as required. This scheme works better than views because there is no metadata lock on the synonym name.
How to Kill Your Book Sales | Carsten’s Random Ramblings
I believe the first time I heard about using publically-available Flightstats database for teaching databases was when Jeremy Cole suggested using it in the MySQL training program to demonstrate working with large data sets. I’m not sure it ever got used for that purpose, but others have followed up on the same idea in other contexts. The Flightstats database contains 10 years of US airline flight information, consisting of several Gigabytes of data in a fairly wide table, and so is excellent for talking about optimizations and search strategies.
The article is about book sales, but it really talks about sample databases for demonstration purposes.
By Joe Celko
There is no such thing as a “universal, one-size-fits-all” key. Just as no two sets of entities are the same, the attributes that make them unique have to be found in the reality of the data. You can decide on the kind of key you want to use based on the nature of your particular situation.
Uniqueness is Global, Not Local
Everyone agrees that an identifier should be unique. But new database programmers often think that being locally unique is good enough. This leads them to cheerfully use a proprietary auto-increment or IDENTITY column as a PRIMARY KEY instead of as a proper relational key. Aristotles Law of Identity is usually stated as “A is A,” but there was a lot more to it than a formula. Every entity has a nature and follows its nature; every entity is separate and unique from all others in the universe.
gotAPI/HTML – Instant search in HTML and other developer documentation:
This is neat. I had to have OmniWeb fib about which browser it is, but cool!
(Via Hoffman Labs.)
the ETL Guy
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DBMS – September 1996 – Data Warehouse Architect
Over the past year I have given many examples of fact tables in dimensional data warehouses. You should recall that fact tables are the large tables “in the middle” of a dimensional schema. Fact tables always have a multipart key, in which each component of the key joins to a single dimension table. Fact tables contain the numeric, additive fields that are best thought of as the measurements of the business, measured at the intersection of all of the dimension values.