Friday, March 14, 2003

I just found and posted the meeting notes from last November's TCPHP meeting:  It covers a presentation about building your own session handling functions for when you want to store a session across several servers on the same application.   4:07:33 PM    comment []

This is really simple, but simple is what I am all about.  When using SELECT DISTINCT from huge tables with many joins, it forces a full table scan and can slow down a query.  SELECT DISTINCT blah blah blah blah blah blah blah FROM A,B,C WHERE A.CUST_ID = B.CUST_ID AND blah blah blah blah blah AND blah Would be inefficient To get around this put the distinct on the outside of a subquery: Select Distinct blah, blah, blah, blah FROM (SELECT blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, FROM A,B,C WHERE A.CUST_ID = B.CUST_ID AND blah AND blah AND blah  AND blah ) 4:05:18 PM    comment []

Exporting Files from Toad.  Toad brings the query results to your desktop. This can be a bad thing if it is a huge query and you need a few tries to get it right. Toad will hog your system resources while it imports all the data from the query. It can be a good thing in that when you go to export the data to a file, it doesn't require another query. When saving to a delimited file, use the SaveAs feature available from right clicking on the result grid. If you check "include null text" any field with no value will show up with the word 'null' in it. If you are doing mailing labels, this is not good. Tab delimited format seems to have been the safest for me. Comma delimited gave me big problems if there was a stray comma in any text values in the result set. 3:55:14 PM    comment []

My dad's new wife, Ellen, writes a recipe review column.  She reviewed the food at her own wedding and posted some of her all time favorites. 2:30:53 PM    comment []

Sometimes I get commands from the puppetmasters while at work and rise from my seat, walk out of the building with a jerky gait and a blank look on my face, not responding to questioning co-workers, not really aware of what I am doing until I am in line for food somewhere. Recently, they made me drive to the Roseville Byerly's for some sushi in a box. Try this for lunch some time to pop you out of your lunch rut. No waiting to speak of, even at the lunch hour rush. There are sushi guys behind the counter making the stuff. You can order a custom job from them or just grab one of the plastic trays from the display case in front. There is a decent sized lunch for about $5.00 and an especially decent sized lunch for about $9.00. The puppetmasters insisted that I get the $9 box. They like to see me treat myself right. This sushi tastes less fresh than the stuff at a fancy sushi restaurant, but the convenience makes up for that and it still tastes damn good. I think it is a little expensive for the amount of food you get, but that is the way of sushi in this country. That Byerly's has a crappy little eating area right near the bathrooms and near a door that lets cold drafts in every so often. Eating sushi so close to a bathroom smashed any delicate presentation they may have had going on, but I forgot about that incongruity as soon as the cells on the inside of my mouth came into contact with the wasabi. Other Byerlys I have eaten at have much better dining areas. The sushi at Byerly's and Lunds comes from Hissho sushi, a national chain that supplies restaurants with sushi. 1:53:49 PM    comment []