Friday, December 17, 2004
MS-SQL, Muscle Relaxation & Home
Alright. I'm back in Calgary now. It's Friday night and I'm going through the typical get home, unpack, check mail, watch TV etc. I decided it was time to jot down my second week out on the coast. During my 6 days of rain since my last post I did manage to get quite a bit accomplished. I would say we reached our goal which was to have the data gathering portion of the site completed. It's there, minus a few small features, and some look and feel things. My next round on the coast and we will finish it off, and make it look the way it's supposed to.
I found no real problems with the project design or implementation in PHP. I did have some learning curve to get a semi-doesnottotallysuckdonkeyass environment set up on windows. I miss my X-paste. I miss my Konsole, I miss my K-Mail. I miss my linux machine period. But I still managed to get there in timely fashion, and I'm quite proud of that. The biggest challenge for me was getting used to the way MS-SQL handles things. It's basically like any other RDBMS, but does handle some things differently with Transact-SQL. For example
Those are just a few. And they are nothing overly interesting or terrible. Just inconviences is all. I made the effort to become accustomed to the MS-SQL Enterprise interface. I _hate_ using a GUI for database design. Just give me vim and I can write the SQL statements myself. At least I'll know whats going on then. I did spend some time trying to sort out the relationships in the GUI. Ended up setting all of them one relationship level too high. I had the all of the wrong FK on the wrong table. Yeah ... that was fun. At least in the flat files I can see my screw up. Amongst a tool bar and a screen that looks like a spreadsheet, the information you really really want in the design view seems rather small. I guess I'm just old school ;-)
So I was staying late one night at the office. Chris left around 8:00 and I decided that since I hadn't eaten that day, food would be a good idea. That way I could just stay for a few more hours and get some work done. So I went around the corner and got some pizzas, and coke. Came back and ate. My back had been bothering me so I took a muscle relaxant, and played Slingo for a while. I started to realize that after not eating until night, and the muscle relaxants taking effect, there was no more work to be done. I could feel my brain just floating away, and I gave up and went back into Victoria. Typical computer programmer fashion ... go go go. Take some pills ... uh-oh can't work anymore. :-S
We didn't quite get everything setup for the internal server. Differences in PHP versions and ini settings. There's some problems with the include paths, and the way I've been doing things. We'll figure it out when I'm back in the new year if Rudy doesn't get it settled. The flight was quick thank God. It's good to be home.
¶ 10:07:00 PM
I found no real problems with the project design or implementation in PHP. I did have some learning curve to get a semi-doesnottotallysuckdonkeyass environment set up on windows. I miss my X-paste. I miss my Konsole, I miss my K-Mail. I miss my linux machine period. But I still managed to get there in timely fashion, and I'm quite proud of that. The biggest challenge for me was getting used to the way MS-SQL handles things. It's basically like any other RDBMS, but does handle some things differently with Transact-SQL. For example
- DATETIME is the datatype, not DATE or TIMESTAMP
- There are no BOOLEAN datatypes, just BIT
- UNIQUEIDENTIFIER datatypes are interesting
- Built in functions for system table access (EXEC sp_columns @table_name mytable)
Those are just a few. And they are nothing overly interesting or terrible. Just inconviences is all. I made the effort to become accustomed to the MS-SQL Enterprise interface. I _hate_ using a GUI for database design. Just give me vim and I can write the SQL statements myself. At least I'll know whats going on then. I did spend some time trying to sort out the relationships in the GUI. Ended up setting all of them one relationship level too high. I had the all of the wrong FK on the wrong table. Yeah ... that was fun. At least in the flat files I can see my screw up. Amongst a tool bar and a screen that looks like a spreadsheet, the information you really really want in the design view seems rather small. I guess I'm just old school ;-)
So I was staying late one night at the office. Chris left around 8:00 and I decided that since I hadn't eaten that day, food would be a good idea. That way I could just stay for a few more hours and get some work done. So I went around the corner and got some pizzas, and coke. Came back and ate. My back had been bothering me so I took a muscle relaxant, and played Slingo for a while. I started to realize that after not eating until night, and the muscle relaxants taking effect, there was no more work to be done. I could feel my brain just floating away, and I gave up and went back into Victoria. Typical computer programmer fashion ... go go go. Take some pills ... uh-oh can't work anymore. :-S
We didn't quite get everything setup for the internal server. Differences in PHP versions and ini settings. There's some problems with the include paths, and the way I've been doing things. We'll figure it out when I'm back in the new year if Rudy doesn't get it settled. The flight was quick thank God. It's good to be home.
¶ 10:07:00 PM
