Monthly Archives: October 2010

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The snippet I paste the most – Google your SQL

We all have one snippet that we use over 100 times daily (excluding logins/passwords), well here is mine:

USE <DATABASE_NAME>
SELECT ROUTINE_NAME, ROUTINE_DEFINITION, LAST_ALTERED
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
WHERE ROUTINE_DEFINITION LIKE '%KEYWORD%'
AND ROUTINE_TYPE = 'PROCEDURE'
ORDER BY ROUTINE_NAME

I call it my very own tiny Google. I am sure this has been posted before but I wanted to share it again. Not only you will get a much smaller set of stored procedures to look into but you also have a sense of when was it last modified (with this version).

Now, what do you paste more than 100 times a day?
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Post Mortem

On a world where image is all it is a breath of fresh air to see how companies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are handling media response to their “down time”. As Oscar Wilde would say: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” and on an ever expanding internet world many face the same issues as the big guys on the block when scaling up and scaling out.

As seen on Mashable’s Post Mortem section no matter how strong our error handling frameworks are there is always room for improvement as seen on Facebook’s article on their “worst outage ever”. We are used to seeing the “FailWhale” but what most people don’t see is how Twitter is usually quick to post on their blog the what, and how the problems were solved. As many sites are moving to other dbms’ like MongoDB we learn a bit from FourSquare’s “re-indexing” problems.

I believe every developer team should have a Post Mortem Wiki or blog were new resources can learn from previous mistakes and a sense of collective knowledge can be shared by the whole team.

Have you implemented this idea in your daily life? Is this part of your Development team practices? Let me know.

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Manage your files graphically

I can’t believe I still go back to this app, but I just can’t argue with simplicity. Have you ever wanted to know which files or folder are the elephants in your hard drive? Well if this is your case try SpaceMonger. This nifty utility will show you in scale your files and folder according to size on drive.

SpaceMonger treemap

SpaceMonger Treemap

If you do find something better send me a comment and I’ll surely try it out.

Update: Thanks to @cyberllaco for letting me know that WhatSize has the same functionality for Mac users.