The More You Know

When working with relational data in a stateless environment (e.g. web applications) it is sometimes not known if something is being created (insert) or being updated. This is generally seen when an object has an 0..N number of sub elements.

When the data from the user is to be processed, it would be best to handle both inserting and updating with a single statement. Developers new to databases generally handle this transaction with multiple statements using conditional “IF” statements to determine the number of rows a result set has. Based on the number of rows (0 or 1) an … Continue Reading

If you had the delight of picking up Portal from Valve and beat it, you know all about cake, the lies, and the masterful end song. I found that upon beating it, I kept humming the song and wishing to know the words. Googling to find the song in any format I found the a YouTube link, awesome. That satiated my ears for a little bit, but I found that my MP3 player, desktop, and laptops were all missing the song while I worked. So, I set out to find how to obtain the song from the data files. … Continue Reading

One of my guild officers created WoW Jutsu and it got me thinking how powerful the armory could be if the data could be accessed. Essentially, the WoW Armory could be a web service that allows the player base to do interesting and cool things with the data. In fact, this has become more and more popular as people are using the Armory as a way to obtain census like data and report their findings.

I have a project in the works that may or may not see the light of day, but either way after Googling and inspecting the … Continue Reading