Recently a colleague sent me a quick instant message asking if I knew of any way in Oracle to make a query run long enough to test a “cancel query” function he was writing in Java.  He had tried several queries that usually produced the results he was looking for, however there wasn’t enough data in his test environment to reproduce the wait time he needed.  I thought about it for a minute and then [...]

I thought I would post a whitepaper I wrote earlier this year under the auspices of my employer, M. Miller & Associates.  This whitepaper is basically a summary of things I have observed over the course of my career in IT, particularly in regard to database design.  I can assure you that I eat my own dog food when it comes to the things I discuss.  I’m in the trenches every day putting into practice [...]

My current development environment has to be the best configuration I’ve had to date in my development career.  Here are some of the specifics: HP EliteBook laptop (8730w) 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 64-bit 6GB Memory openSuse 11.1 64-bit The move to Linux from Windows has been a huge plus, though not without its own challenges.  But it’s not just the hardware and OS.  Here are the tools that round out a highly productive development environment:

Well, even though I am not a numerologist, I still think 9/9/09 is a special day.  Why so? Clearly it’s because today is the first general WASABI-SIG meeting.  If you have an interest in data warehousing, business intelligence, data management, systems analysis, data visualization, etc., and most importantly, if you live in the DFW metroplex, I encourage you to come out and be a part of this new special interest group.