Viewing profile — butlerm

> If that's the case, you will have an overhead anyway, the only question being whether it's at the DB level or at the application level. Inserts and updates do not require referen…

Referential integrity problems usually happen due to missing deletes, improper deletes, or references that should be cleared. The overhead of checking for the existence of referred…

It is quite common for modern databases to have multiversion concurrency so that writers do not block readers. If you do not your transactions should either be awfully short, you s…

Orphaned detail records are usually inconsequential, like uncollected garbage. References to anything with an optional relationship should use outer joins as a matter of course. If…

Typically you look for orphan rows - the sort of thing ON DELETE CASCADE was invented to prevent. Another thing to check for are records that need to exist but should have referenc…

Large ERP systems do that sort of thing as a matter of course and have for decades now. It does require careful planning and design. I mean AR / AP / scheduling / manufacturing / i…

If you do not particularly care about performance or have a great deal of headroom then database enforcement of referential integrity is great. Alternatively you could just write t…

Perhaps someone should define a new C compatible threading API to allow C libraries (including glibc or a wrapper around glibc) to work with something other than native pthreads. S…

It is basically impossible to write general purpose software like compilers, word processors, and layout engines without doing heap allocations. That means either pointers or refer…

It is generally speaking difficult to make an efficient implementation of the compiler and/or the virtual machine for many memory safe languages without writing it in a more effici…

That would be convenient, and some programming environments have support for that kind of thing already. A hierarchical object valued expression would also be convenient in a diffe…

The main application for this is where you have detail data for parent records in a snowflake pattern. In that case SQL tends to require a ridiculous number of queries, where commo…

It is possible for telcos to provide point to point or point to multipoint layer 2 permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) from customers to providers or branch offices to home offices, …

Making your code run quickly will not help if your software architecture is inefficient or optimized against the customer as so many web applications are these days, for example. T…

There is a considerable divergence of opinion on that subject. In my view, C++ isn't remotely suitable as a programming language for someone without a healthy understanding of C. P…

Whether tax deductions are subsidies or not depends on whether they are targeted at and benefit particular industries or special interests in a way that others do not qualify for.

A libertarian would say that purveyors of poison would face civil and criminal liability after the fact if anyone was harmed.

As I understand it, the U.S. does not subsidize petroleum marketers, or at least not very much. Oil companies are generally taxed on net income after expenses and depreciation, sam…

The cable ISPs are exactly the kind of companies that could use a little regulation under Title II, they are horrible. My point is that government regulation is likely to make cost…

Net neutrality is largely about blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Treatment of Internet access and transit services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 is…

A dash is definitely not the same as a minus. A hyphen however is so close as to cause a serious ambiguity, so much so that they call the standard character a hyphen minus. So if s…

If an IME doesn't enter a standard hyphen-minus by default, no matter what the language is, that is basically engineering malpractice. How could anyone not know that would fail har…

I would love to believe that advertising would go away if only we all paid subscription fees. Cable television tells a different story.

I believe in most relational databases you can just alter a column to allow null values and run a series of transactions in the background to set that column value to null, and tha…