David Tate

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Exception (Mis)Handling

Exception handling was originally created to try to give developers a way to separate out error handling so that it wouldn’t clutter up and distract from the core functionality trying to be accomplished. When done well, exception handling can provide a clean way to instrument and separate truly exceptional

Key considerations for your next development job

As a developer, your basic job is to create things. Since the world needs software in every industry you might think that one is the same as the next, and you’d be shamefully wrong. Outside of the obvious questions you should ask yourself when looking for your next gig

Complexity

Complexity

Software Development is management of true complexity, not false complexity

Triggers Part 3: FAQ and FOP Continued

This is part of a 3 part epic mini-series on triggers, view Part 1 and Part 2. How many triggers should you have per table? Ideally zero. If you have any then there should be one. There is no guarantee on the ordering of trigger firings, they normally fire based

Triggers Part 2: Facts and Frequently-Occuring-Problems (FOP)

This is part of a 3 part epic mini-series on triggers, view Part 1 and Part 3. When are triggers fired, and how many times? For your standard missionary position trigger, they are fired once per batch. So if you have an update statement that affects 57 rows, then the

Triggers Part 1: Introduction to madness, plus whores

This is part of a 3 part epic mini-series on triggers, view Part 2 and Part 3. According to the standard developer canon about databases you should avoid triggers like you avoid wearing your “I love goto statements” t-shirt at the company Christmas party (again). Knowledge of triggers is verboten,

Running SQL cross servers

If you work with more than one database and have the constant need to run the same query across multiple servers, the undocumented stored procedure sp_MSforeachdb can be useful; see below example comparing stored procedures across servers using a simple checksum to tell if they are the same exact