Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer

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• Continuous Integration
• Design Patterns
• Legacy Code
• Ranting
• Test Driven Development

• Remembering how to use Oracle

  I'm using Oracle for the first time in about 3 years starting today. I thought it would be like coming home because I grew up on Oracle 7.34 and then on to Oracle 8.1.7. I know I routinely bash the usage of stored procedures and hand rolled data access... Posted Apr 30 2007, 10:19 AM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence

• Don't know about "CodeBetter," but I'm with Ayende

  Right off the bat, the "CodeBetter" guys did not give any sort of collective "seal of approval" to the Linq to Entities Framework -- and why the hell would it matter even if we did? I found the Entities Framework to be intriguing for... Posted Apr 10 2007, 09:04 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Ranting

• Don't Let the Database Dictate Your Object Model

  Before you go on, I'm specifically worried at the moment about "Logic Intensive Systems" here. Systems that perform complex calculations, make optimizations, determinations, decisions, etc. Many, if not most, enterprise applications have... Posted Feb 23 2007, 09:18 AM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 55 comment(s) Filed under: Legacy Code, Database and Persistence

• How do you extend and customize a database?

  Here's the scenario: your application is frequently customized per customer, and that means the database has to accomodate new types of information. My question to you is what do you think is the best (least bad) way? Here are the strategems I've... Posted Feb 19 2007, 09:51 AM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 13 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence

• Interacting with a Strange Database

  I relearned a couple of lessons today about working with database intensive applications. Fortunately, I was merely writing test automation code and I caught my problems fairly quickly, but... You should get the System DateTime.Now in a consistent manner... Posted Nov 15 2006, 11:02 AM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Ranting

• Grab bag of follow up's for data access, persistence, query engines, and o/r mapping

  Just catching up on questions and comments from the Why I do not use Stored Procedures post yesterday. Sachin Rao asked my take about using an O/R mapper for for reporting. I'd say "it depends," but in a purely reporting system I would probably opt for... Posted May 26 2006, 12:42 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 7 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence

• Why I do not use Stored Procedures

  I promised myself that I wouldn't ever make another post about stored procedures , but Eric's post on sproc's hit a few of my hot buttons on the subject. Four years ago the pre-Agile, VB6/ASP coding me would have fervently agreed with Eric's pro-sproc... Posted May 25 2006, 02:45 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 29 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Ranting

• OO, TDD, and Agile processes are all good, but better get the basic things right too

  Author: Jeremy D. Miller I mostly blog about more or less abstract topics like Agile development processes, design patterns, and TDD strategies because it's what I'm mostly interested in at the moment. I definitely think these topics are important, but it's often doing the basic things poorly that make a system unreliable and hard to modify and support. There are some underlying activities that we have to do to make a system function well, and some of t Posted Feb 07 2006, 11:55 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence

• Overthrowing the Tyranny of the Shared Database

  My team is making some structural improvements to plug some holes in our B2B messaging services. The problem we’re starting to run into is a single database structure that is shared by at least a half-dozen applications, administrative applets, and assorted... Posted Oct 30 2005, 02:58 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 13 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Continuous Integration

• Unit Testing Business Logic without Tripping Over the Database

  A fairly common topic with TDD practitioners, both newbie and experienced, is how the heck to unit test business logic with a database hanging around. I’ve had several conversations lately about this so I thought I’d get a post about it. Before I try... Posted Oct 12 2005, 01:57 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 25 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Design Patterns, Ranting, Test Driven Development

• Exposing a Connection String as a Public Property is a Huge Design Smell

  Pure diatribe ahead: Take a look at this code and ignore any concerns over security just at the moment: public class MyConfiguration { public static string ConnectionString { get { // lookup the connection string wherever it is string connectionString... Posted Sep 28 2005, 09:27 AM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Ranting

• Database per Developer and Environment

  Our Continuous Integration talk Monday got a bit rushed at the end and I missed an important point when we talked about CI with databases. For the love of all that is good and holy in the world create a separate database/schema for: Each development workstation... Posted Sep 21 2005, 04:03 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 13 comment(s) Filed under: Continuous Integration, Database and Persistence, Ranting, Test Driven Development

• Journey into the Heart of Darkness

  My poor colleague (martyr) is trying to debug a production issue with some system generated emails today. If I can get the facts straight, the chain of calls goes: ASP "Classic" page calling into a... Stored Procedure that calls... Another Stored Procedure... Posted Sep 12 2005, 04:56 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Ranting

• Don't play with strange databases...

  ...you don't know where they've been, or who's been touching them. I've been burned pretty badly in the past by making assumptions about existing databases. Database documentation isn't always helpful either, because it is out of date or just wrong to... Posted Jul 11 2005, 07:02 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Database and Persistence, Legacy Code, Ranting

• Harris Boyce warns us that O/R isn't a silver bullet

  Harris Boyce wrote a response to my ADO.NET contagion post: "Soul Vaccination" for Data Access Layers . I think that Harris is quite right in warning us about overusing Object/Relational mapping. While there are still plenty of scenarios where I would... Posted Jul 11 2005, 07:01 PM by Jeremy D. Miller with | with no comments Filed under: Database and Persistence