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Interesting things about TIMESTAMP data type in MySQL
TIMESTAMP is interesting in that it can give you an easy way of keeping track of when was the last time a row was modified, with a few caveats, listed below. The tests were run on 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL). By default, TIMESTAMP is NOT NULL. Inserting a NULL value causes it to store…
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Consolidating Twitter feeds with Yahoo Pipes
I have been suffering from web addiction for a long time. So when Twitter first came out, I figured that would be the last thing I need. Plus, to really take advantage of Twitter, you’ve got to have a relatively fancy phone with a data plan. A decent phone costs anywhere between 150 and 400…
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Thoughts on Data Masking
Often times, production data needs to be moved to different environments for testing/developing purposes. However, some of that data can be people’s name, birthday, address, account number, etc., that we don’t want testers and/or developers to see, due to privacy and regulatory concerns. Hence the need to mask those data. I can certainly see this…
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Random oddity
Recently I wrote a program to reshuffle data in a csv file. And I ran into a problem with Random in C#. Let’s look at the following program. One would think that it should print 5 integers, randomly picked between 0 and 8. But no, in almost all cases, the program prints the same integer…
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Sql Server database mirroring automatic failover verification
Starting with Sql Server 2005, Sql Server provides an interesting high availability option at individual database level, called database mirroring. When configured in high availability mode (principal, mirror, and witness), provided that: 1. Failover Partner information is supplied in the connection string; 2. Application code knows to retry database operations; then automatic fail over will…