Sounds like a good idea to me. Any discontinuity injected into the timeline is a major nightmare for programmers. I work for a software house that deals with lots of time-series data e.g. Electricity usage per hour. We have a lot of clever people with first class degrees in Computer Science, Physics etc and the Daylight savings changes still confuse the hell out of us. It's fine if you can work in UTC and just convert when displaying to the user but our software has to work internally with clock time and everyone seems to make different mistakes. Are any programmers here familiar with this particular brand of hell?
Back when I finished my masters at Cambridge(UK) a few years back, we were using Fortran 95. There was no IDE, so debuging was fun. You just got a nice message like "Core Dumped...".
Does anyone remember all the programming books that used to be aimed at kids? I'm sure in the 80's I had a number of these. Perhaps they expected everyone to be writting their own word processors and spread-sheets in the future rather than buying them.
The company I for deals with major UK power companies and a lot of them now have a policy that all internally developed systems use Stored Procedures for security purposes, although they are no yet forcing this on externally purchased systems.
Obviously SP's are important for security but there are times when dynamic SQL makes things so much easier. For example, imagine you have a form that shows the details of all of your stock. You might want to throw all different kinds of queries to get the information you want. e.g. "Show me all
items from electrical goods made by Phillips that cost under £300." or "Show me all kitchen products that come with a 2 year guarentee"
These sorts of queries need flexible WHERE clauses. In our applications we use a flexible Where Clause generator I created. You just set the
constraints on the WhereClause object and it generates the necesary SQL without lots of messy if-then-elseif type logic.
How would you do the same thing in a stored procedure? Lots of if clauses? Writing a flexible
clause generator in SQL?
I'm sure you could do it some way but it think its a lot neater doing this sort of thing in the application.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a good idea to me. Any discontinuity injected into the timeline is a major nightmare for programmers. I work for a software house that deals with lots of time-series data e.g. Electricity usage per hour. We have a lot of clever people with first class degrees in Computer Science, Physics etc and the Daylight savings changes still confuse the hell out of us. It's fine if you can work in UTC and just convert when displaying to the user but our software has to work internally with clock time and everyone seems to make different mistakes. Are any programmers here familiar with this particular brand of hell?
Back when I finished my masters at Cambridge(UK) a few years back, we were using Fortran 95. There was no IDE, so debuging was fun. You just got a nice message like "Core Dumped...". Does anyone remember all the programming books that used to be aimed at kids? I'm sure in the 80's I had a number of these. Perhaps they expected everyone to be writting their own word processors and spread-sheets in the future rather than buying them.
The company I for deals with major UK power companies and a lot of them now have a policy that all internally developed systems use Stored Procedures for security purposes, although they are no yet forcing this on externally purchased systems. Obviously SP's are important for security but there are times when dynamic SQL makes things so much easier. For example, imagine you have a form that shows the details of all of your stock. You might want to throw all different kinds of queries to get the information you want. e.g. "Show me all items from electrical goods made by Phillips that cost under £300." or "Show me all kitchen products that come with a 2 year guarentee" These sorts of queries need flexible WHERE clauses. In our applications we use a flexible Where Clause generator I created. You just set the constraints on the WhereClause object and it generates the necesary SQL without lots of messy if-then-elseif type logic. How would you do the same thing in a stored procedure? Lots of if clauses? Writing a flexible clause generator in SQL? I'm sure you could do it some way but it think its a lot neater doing this sort of thing in the application.