SQL options

What do you use?

I spend a good portion of my days hopping back and forth between SQL Server and Oracle. The built in Studio Management work just fine for me for SQL Server, but I find myself using TOAD for some tasks and PL/SQL Developer for others in Oracle.

This is a much greater debate than Chrome v. Firefox because my precious, precious productivity (aka TIME) is at stake. Looking forward to hearing about what I should really be using. Then again, maybe it's just a Google issue. If I'd just find out how to do the things I use one for in the other, then I could stick to one piece of software.

Then again, sometimes you need a paring knife and sometimes you need a cleaver. Or, in my own experience, sometimes you need buttercream and sometimes only fondant will work. I'll let you decide which is which.

Building bits a-plenty

I spent most of the weekend writing a new module for our team's ticketing system. Visual Studio 2010 makes everything ridiculously easy. I remember hating WYSIWYGs a decade ago, but VS makes creating a fully dynamic ASPX site with SQL back-end nearly drag and drop.

Oh, sure, we still have to add some VB and write the stored procedures, but working on this with my partner has been the most fun we've had in a while. Probably the best part is that we are building something that our (internal) customers have desperately needed for some time.

The trick of this project is that we keep scope creeping. Every time we finish a piece of the system, we discover a new piece that we need. It's half insanely frustrating and half too much fun. But I suppose that's to be expected when you support so many different business models.

And yet somehow I managed to have the baby help me build a raised garden bed. She was so helpful with the measuring tape and even putting our weight into the drill to be sure that the screw is countersunk.
Next weekend is the dirt-filling and the irrigation. I'm looking forward to so much fun in the sun!

social media versus politics

Going through Google+ and Twitter to find people I want to Follow has led to some interesting discussions in my head. For instance:

• Don't politicians have friends?
• They spend a lot of time shaking hands, but how many people do they know?
• If politicians are slow to adopt, does that imply that they are slow to adapt?
• Is that the kind of person I want representing me?
• What percentage of the American populace is actually geek?
• Shouldn't there be a similar percentage of early-adopting politicians?
• Can we reboot the system?
• Why does everyone fear 1984's all-powerful government but no one freaks over Jennifer Government's capitalist agenda?

From the corporate viewpoint, I've seen how difficult it is to stop production to make vital changes, no matter how important those fixes might be or even how much Return On Investment is expected. Can you imagine if instead of 80,000 people impacted by a 30 minute reboot for a 20 year-old system we tried to restructure the entire 200 year-old government structure? I shudder to think.

And no matter how well it is project-managed or planned, there is always that unknown Risk factor. And no matter how well-intentioned people are with developing a parallel system (like Esperanto), early adopters are no match for inertia.

If only there was a way. Oh wait, there is. That's the beauty of a democracy, isn't it? There's always hope.