I’m headed to SpringOne 2GX tomorrow with a colleague of mine. I’m super pumped about it. I hope to get to meet some of the people who have helped me in my Spring/Groovy/Grails journey over the years via forums, blogs, and twitter by responding to my questions or opinions. It’ll be nice to meet, in person, Dave Klein, Andres Almiray, Graeme Rocher, and Jeff Scott Brown… just to name a few.
I spent hours looking over the session slides and, as is normal for any NFJS related conference, there are too many great sessions to go to them all. I am still up in the air on a few of the time slots because I just can’t decide yet. I am waiting to see if I want to follow a few threads deeply or just get the shallow details and move on to something else. I am really interested in Groovy and Grails tooling so I will definitely be hitting some sessions on STS. I also want to learn something about Roo… I’m just not sure whether I’ll make it all the way to the ‘advanced Roo’ session. Basically, I’ll be all over the board as far as session topics so I can’t really say there’s a theme for me.
I’ll add some postings to the blog in case anyone is interested in my opinions on the topics/sessions I attended.
The day is over. The bar is still going strong, but too much smoke for me… and I’ve been in enough sessions on the day after a night of partying at a conference and I just dont have it in me anymore (Getting old I guess). So I ordered one last cold one to go and decided to write a few lines in the blog about today’s sessions.
Read more…
I’m not a data architect or DBA, but in my current and past positions I, like most software developers, have been responsible for designing schemas for both simple and complex databases. One thing I always waffle about is whether to compose keys from meaningful data or generate surrogate keys for my tables.
I have always been a proponent of using surrogate, or blind, keys. The reason is that I have faced scenarios where what is said to be an iron-clad rule about the business meaning associated with a primary key suddenly changes requiring the need to change that primary key – most DBs don’t handle this well. It’s also cumbersome constructing joins on natural keys when they are composed of several columns. With that said, I do see advantages to having real meaning attached to the fields used as a composite key.
What do you think? Is this a matter of preference of the database designer or is there some rule or advantage that I don’t know of that would be a definite answer one way or another?
Here are a couple of articles to refer to for arguments.
http://www.bcarter.com/intsurr1.htm
http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/general/
… so my site will be down until I can get to the server and check it out. Another reason to think about paid hosting.
We had some pretty bad storms last night and the power went out. I forgot to head to the basement to fire the server back up. I guess that’s one reason to think about paying for a hosted blog.
It should be back up later today.
Just when I’m thinking how the momentum for M$ will probably kick into gear (JavaOne is over. The JavaFX buzz has died down) M$ drops this gem on the software development world. You’ve probably seen it by now and there are a ton of opinions on the net about it. Here’s mine… Read more…
This is another trackback test for http://mikewitters.com/?p=22 . In this one I’m explicitly adding the trackback in the trackback section.
This is me testing trackback at http://mikewitters.com/?p=22 . We’ll see if it works.
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I’ve always loved playing the guitar. I’ve always loved tapping my hands and feet to drum beats (People always have to get on me for beating the table or desk or my feet while in meetings). I’m a decent rythm guitarist, but can’t play the drums worth a lick. This guy (Andy Mckee) does it all – with a single guitar. Truly amazing.
