Author Archives: davidjmurray

Data Privacy Day

Posted on January 28, 2012 by davidjmurray

Today is Data Privacy Day. This occurs every year on the 28 January. Data Privacy Day is an annual international celebration designed to promote awareness about privacy and education about best privacy practices. Click on the link above to go … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Privacy | Tagged | Leave a comment

Open and Closed Programming Worlds.

Posted on October 10, 2011 by davidjmurray

The perils of Vivek Haldar – his article (http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/5542454900/the-perils-of-closed-worlds) covers the idea that a computer language or system can be a closed or open world. To some extent, this is true. For instance, JAVA can be considered a closed world, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What happened in 1986?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by davidjmurray

I have been rather busy of late, doing a bit of reading and a lot of research regarding the NF² or The Nested Relational Model. While browsing my old Universities library last year, I discovered an old text book on … Continue reading →

Posted in General, mvdbs, Publications, RANT, SQL, Technologies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Document Paradigm in UniBasic

Posted on May 16, 2011 by davidjmurray

Yet again, while running around the great inter-web, I found an interesting article which compares different database paradigms. The comparisons provided are between relational, document, key/value, and column-oriented databases. This lead me to thinking back to a comment that someone … Continue reading →

Posted in Idea!, mvdbs, SystemBuilder, Techniques, UniBasic | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Microsoft to standardize NoSQL?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by davidjmurray

An interesting news item from Computer World points to an article in the ACM magazine about Microsoft wanting to standardize NoSQL – similar to SQL (Structured Query Language) and how this gained traction for relational databases. This also leads to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Free eBook on Database Team Development

Posted on March 24, 2011 by davidjmurray

Well, the focus of the book is on Microsoft SQL-Server, but there are some ideas there, which may be of interest to U2 people. Have a look at – http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-source-control/entrypage/assets/RG_Guide_to_SQL_Server_Dev.pdf

Posted in Free-bees, Publications, SQL, Techniques | Leave a comment

Knuth Humor

Posted on March 4, 2011 by davidjmurray

I recently purchased Donald Knuth’s ‘The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 3: Sorting and Searching”.  It’s a heavy read, but has some rather good bits. Also Knuth has a sense of humor which lightens the reading a wee bit, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogroll, General | Tagged | Leave a comment

How to time travel with @DATE

Posted on February 28, 2011 by davidjmurray

Way back in Feb. 2008, I started to write this article about an interesting @DATE pass-by-reference issue. Then I got sidetracked. So, this bug existed in whatever version was trialware at that time. Guess what? It still exists in 10.3.7.0 … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code, mvdbs, U2, unFeature, UniBasic | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Cult of Excel

Posted on February 28, 2011 by davidjmurray

I have written about the use of MS-Excel before (see related posts at end), so an article on the weirder uses of MS-Excel is not out of order- http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9211699/Use_Microsoft_Excel_for_Nearly_Everything . As most IT people have found, I also repeatedly find … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Techniques | Tagged | Leave a comment

DRY Subroutines

Posted on February 26, 2011 by davidjmurray

The principle of DRY has been around for sometime. When applied to the PICK/U2 environment, there are two main methods of implementation via routines – internal subroutines (GOSUB) and external subroutines (SUBROUTINE/FUNCTION). But the relationship between these two methods and … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Idea!, mvdbs, SystemBuilder, Techniques, UniBasic, UniVerse | Tagged , , | Leave a comment