fendale

I've seen some Oracle systems push some big data around and handle pretty high trans per second, but I have never worked on any of these financial systems which seem to require more speed and trans per second than any system I have ever built or worked on.

Personally I would love to see if Oracle can match these other systems out there, purely from an interest point of view!

Well, I can't imagine SQL Server handling your requirements, and I find it unlikely a mission critical system like this will use MySQL or Postgres (primarily because Enterprises like to pay a lot for that 'security' of support), so I'd shoot for Sybase if its not Oracle?

The reason I ask is because I am a pretty highly skilled Oracle guy, and some of the numbers I have seen around financial systems just seem so fast and big volume transactions per second. Maybe I could get Oracle to do them, but then the zero downtime scares me somewhat as until very recently, keeping Oracle up all the time, even through application upgrades is fairly tricky!

Can you say what DB you are running? Is it Oracle?

It always baffles me why an organisation with a large number of highly technical staff decide to outsoure things en-mass to suppliers.

I currently work for a company with a large number of highly skilled IT people, but it still insists on outsourcing projects en-mass, despite failure after failure (with a fairly loose definition of failure, which can be very late projects, or unmaintainable code bases, or bug after bug after bug ...).

Granted there may not be enough full time staff to take the project on, but surely things would be more successful by brining in a pool of contracts to work inhouse alongside the full timers?

I know at least two guys who are getting paid closer to £1000 a day to work in London for a bank. The money is pretty much insane imho, and the guys tells me the 'talent' is just like anywhere else - ie most people are meerly compentent (but still getting paid £500 plus a day). Even graduates with zero experience are taken on at £300 a day or more.

He seems to better than competent, and so has managed to negotiate a much higher rate.

Yea, I have seen Oracle do basically the same thing, and our solution is to stick in a stored outlined (effectively locking the plan). If you own the code (ie it is not a 3rd party COTS package) you can also use hints to control queries. I would hate to be without hints in Oracle.

Oracle 11g apparently can spot when a query plan changes and the new one is much slower than the old one - at least that is what is says in the documentation. Whether it works or not I will find out if we ever get a system upgraded to 11g!

I agree with this so much I wish I could upvote it more!

I'm a very experienced Oracle developer and Oracle does a really good job, but I need hintsto fix problems more often that I would like, especially on complex reporting queries.

Good point, I actually thought of doing that and then dismissed it. Maybe the best perfoming way would be to use the remainder as the index to an array (suggested in another comment)?

I had to lookup what itoa is not being a C programmer. Which got me interested - how would you implement this?

My inital thought is to do something like (in pseudo code):

    str = '';
    while (i > 0 ) {
      # least significant digit
      r = i % 10;
      # throw away the least significant digit
      i = i / 10;
      case
        when r = 0 then
          str =  '0' << str
        when r == 1 then
          str =  '1' << str
        ... etc
      end
    }
    return str;

Would I pass with that? Is there a better way?

For me, I use Ruby for everything I used to use Perl for, unless I can't get ruby on the system (still haven't managed a successful compile on HPUX!). The other use case is that Perl has a library Ruby does not, which still happens now and then.

The Credit Card companies offer the rewards to encourage people to use their cards. The rewards may be about 1% of spend or so in general. By encouraging people to spend more, a significant proportion of those people will fail to pay the card off in full each month and get charged X% interest (not sure what common rates are, but they are pretty steep).

I'd imagine the companies have done their sums, and make much more on interest that they pay out in rewards when averaged across a large number of customers.

I would also suspect (haven't researched it) that reward paying cards will have a higher interest rate than non-reward cards.

Yes yes yes. In my experience in Enterprise Dev teams it seems to be way too common that people just don't version control their DB schema, or use tools to produce schema diffs between dev and prod to product upgrade scripts, all driven by using GUI's to create their tables and then exporting the DDL using a tool (eg TOAD if you are doing Oracle work).

A few years back, I built an installer in Ruby to apply 'plsql modules' to an Oracle database. This was a massive project with > 100 developers at this point and probably heading toward 1M lines of code.

My migrations table worked on modules, so there were a set of migrations per application area, but it was really just an extension of this idea (and I borrowed the idea from Rails too)!

> P.S. I think your experience is a pretty good example of what drives many people to build startups.

Yea, this place drives me more and more mad. I have dabbled in my own side projects, but I am thinking more and more that the time to leave the mega-corporation will have to come soon, for my own sanity at least!

Oh I know this. The team I was pointing this out to didn't design or build this system, they meerly have to support it, like me.

Agree the best way critize is by showing you can do better, but this is a muli-terrabyte system, so its not easy.

This post arrived here today just after me getting told off for being honest, again. I still don't know if being too honest is right or wrong.

I work in a big company (100K employees worldwide), and as such there are company politics going on that few would believe unless you worked there.

This time I got scolded for telling some of our DBA team members that the database we were trying to fix was a schema design disaster from day 1 - I didn't call anyone out, just plainly stated the problems with the design so we don't make the same mistakes again. Apparently admitting that outside my local team could lead to bad things happening politically, and I should just say nothing.

What are you supposed to do? Lie, refuse to comment when asked, sweep the problems under the rug (which is generally what happens)? I really don't know, and as a hacker, I am not great at playing the big company games. Maybe I should say nothing a bit more often, but that doesn't exactly get the customers served any better. So far I have stuck with the honest approach, but I still don't know if its correct or not!

Interesting - I think think that is way out of line, but maybe it adds weight to the argument of point blank refusing to reveal your salary at all. Perhaps I should reconsider my strategy :-/

The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, The Pragmatic Programmer and all the classic Joel On Software Articles - they taught me so much. Unfortunately, just like you I have encountered very few people in my day job who have heard of these books. I am not sure if that is reflective of a big company, or IT folk in general?

Maybe correct. Ideally I'd like them to make me an offer based on what they think I am worth, considering market rates etc.

However if they insist on me revealing my salary, I am going to assume its so they have try and gauge how much it would take to make me jump to them, which is (in my mind) on the same ethical level as my exaggerating my existing salary to try and negotiate a better deal.

Last time I went for an interview I learned that you should not be honest about your salary ... let me try to explain.

I am at a certain level in a big company with a salary range that is quite large. Many people at my level earn £5000 - £7000 more than me, mainly because they have been around in the company a lot longer.

In my last interview, I was offered a job and the company offered me my current salary + about £5000 (I was honest about what I was earning when they asked). Now, being that many of my collegues were currently earning that for doing the same job as me, I always wondered if they would still have offered me a £5000 bump if I had exaggerated my salary by £5k to start with.

I guess I will never know, and I didn't take that job for other reasons, but the guy really wanted me to work there, and I got the impression that he was trying to tempt me in with an offer that is just big enough compared to my current salary, without really reflecting on my skills and what they were worth.

I decided then that my salary would be exaggerated a little to any agencys or interviewers who ask so I can try and negotiate a better deal, ethical or not.

I've just spend half a day today trying to upgrade my rails 2.x app to Rails 3. I think I am going to give up on it, as it is breaking things everywhere. The UJS is the main problem, as I have tons of AJAX things going on, and quite a few things that are not really done the 'rails way' (I was learning as I developed this App).

I guess this app is destined to stay at Rails 2 and I will just start a new one for Rails 3, once I get a good enough idea!

My one and old Rails app is running using Apache + Passenger. When I set it up, I wanted to get it using SSL site wide as easily as possible, so I just stuck in a rewrite rule in Apache:

  RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

It's been a year since I did that, but I think that's what I used to force the entire site into https only requests.

As someone who regularly swims 100 plus 25 meter lengths in a session, I can testify that the Total Immersion book and swimming style can make a big difference. It's all about balance in the water and builds it up over a series of 'karate kid' drills that break the stroke down into learnable chunks that all eventually come together.

I've had a VPS on prgmr.com up for months now with no problems. I mostly knew what I was doing, so I didn't have any need for support questions, but it basically does what I expected it to do well.

I came across the gtrends tool that supposedly helps you find niche markets in the past few days - it looks like it may be helpful.

Do you care to share any example sites you have produced that bring in some amount of money passively?

I am currently employed in a decent job at a big corporation, so my goal at the moment is to do something that makes some money, so $12 a month be a start. I have in my mind a 2 year plan to some sort of independence.

As I said, I would much rather spend my spare time building Rails Apps that provide a useful function to some small set of people willing to pay something for the pleasure, but finding the niche markets is the problem.

How exactly do you do the backlinking thing? Do you literally create supposedly related sites with 'rehashes' of your same articles and place a link on one to the other?

There was a story on here a few weeks back by someone leading the 4 hour work week nomadic lifestyle and it in the comments I think it was hinted that was the case.

> If you want the lowest risk sure fire way to make money online though, it's certainly "Find a niche" -> "Create useful content" -> "Promote" -> "Monetize through advertising".

I keep hearing this Find A Niche thing, and I have been doing some research. It really sounds like a case of researching stuff and writing some useful articles on it. Place the articles on a SEO optimized website and wait for the adsense dollars to roll in.

If it is that easy, surely everyone would be doing it, or is it really that easy?

While I would like a passive revenue stream, the only problem I have with this strategy is that I don't really want to spend my time researching and writing articles. I would much rather find a niche market for an online software app (sort of like patio11's bingocardcreator) that is small enough to build fairly quickly and makes a difference to some market, but finding such a market if you don't already have inside knowledge is the hard part I am finding.

The TV license is already £142 a year, or about £12 a month. I think even that is expensive never mind suggesting paying them £120 a month whether you watch the BBC channels or not.

When you compare what you get from Sky (if you are into sports and movies and the US shows on Sky 1), the BBC license fee is steep enough.

That said, they do provide a good service, and wouldn't be able to if it was not for the license fee model, but it does annoy me that I cannot opt out of watching BBC and waive the license fee and yet still watch Sky Sports becasue its a against the law!

Exactly correct - and if you are using Oracle and not using parameterised queries (known as bind variables in the Oracle world), you are quickly going to have performance problems too. That's not the case with MYSQL as it doesn't have a cursor cache in the same way Oracle has. I have no idea about Postgres or SQLServer.

A rule of thumb is that if you are concatenting user input strings into your SQL query strings you are doing it wrong.

I am on the cable national broadband for sure - def not ADSL. My bill tells me I am on the XL 20MB package.

I am still running one of the really old grey modems though. They sent me a new black one ages ago, but I have not activated it as yet. Maybe I should give that a try (have held back for fear of it knocking out my broadband for a few days if things go wrong!) and see if things get better.

My speed is pretty good, but I have never been able to push it toward even 10Mbps no matter how many downloads I have going.

I recently upgraded my Virgin Media 10Mbps broadband to 20Mbps to get a price reduction, and to be honest, I don't notice it being one bit faster.

I seem to get about 3 - 4Mbps max download speed, which is what I got before. Maybe there is something wrong with my setup, but I have one box connected directly to the modem with 100Mbps ethernet and I have never seen it go even close to 20Mbps unfortunately.