4 Oct 2007 nymia   » (Master)

Cursors Can Be Deadly

When planning on writing SQL code, especially stored procedure code, you really need to think twice about employing the use of cursors. Here’s why:

  1. A single cursor will do just fine, provided you don’t mix it up with joined tables/views.
  2. A nested cursor will surely bring your server down to its knees. Mix it up with temptables and it will even slow down to a crawl.

At first, when you get it coded and tested, make sure that code runs against 10 gigabyte logfile. You will surely reward yourself for doing this test first before the code goes to prod, though.

In my case, the DB broke the 1Gigabyte barrier very early, by about 2 to 3 weeks after rollout. At that rate, we’ll be maintaining a huge DB soon, perhaps it will morph into a VLDB within 2 years.

Google Docs

I’ve never heard or read about Google Docs, what it does or what advantage it has over the competition, until I got into this odd situation.

I was firing-through the given assignments and noticed something not right with the way I was using technology in setting-up a repo for my assignments. it turns out Google has these nifty small tools for creating and publishing docs online. So I fired-up the browser and started using the following:

  • Presentation - Most of the lecture notes were converted into this format. I was able to convert all my notes in one sitting. it’s all online now, presentation format. Man, I’m telling you, this is cool.
  • Spreadsheet - This tool is a time saver, I simply entered all the numbers. Did all the standard steps in setting up the financial statements like Income Statement, Statement of Owner’s Equity and the Balance Sheet. Google Spreadsheet handled it very nicely. The cool thing about it is–its now available online.

Syndicated 2007-10-04 05:38:22 from Freedom Culture

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