Author: Vjeko

This author has written 451 articles

Is Visual Studio Code really an improvement

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  • Reading time:8 mins read

Progress often doesn’t look like progress at all when it first arrives.

When on July 3, 1886, Daimler Benz presented his first car, it had a 0.75 horse-power engine that could reach a top speed of 16 km/h. It was able to cover 45 km on a single fuel tank, and it could only take two passengers. Compared to best horse-driven carriages of the day, especially taking the availability of stuff you could use as fuel, this was hardly a progress. Horse-driven carriages bested this car on all fronts, and by large margins.

Imagine what the world would look like today should Daimler Benz heeded the naysayers and mockers of his day, and they were not in short supply.

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More about ISEMPTY

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  • Reading time:8 mins read

I had much second thought about whether I should even blog this one. You know, it so profoundly belongs in the Duh! category that I have actually created the Duh! category specifically for this post.

Now, fasten your seatbelt. I apologize for what you are about to see,  but apparently people do write code as the example below. And I sh*t you not, you can’t really make this crap up, but this is what people do:

IF NOT Cust.ISEMPTY THEN
  REPEAT
    DoSomethingStupid(Cust);
  UNTIL Cust.NEXT = 0;

Wat?

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When you just must COUNT, no matter what

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  • Reading time:6 mins read

I started with blogging about COUNT = 0 situation. Then I followed it with COUNT = 1. So, let’s do a COUNT = 2 today. No, no, I am just kidding, don’t worry 🙂 But I still have to do one more COUNT post, one that will cover all other COUNT situations.

Believe it or not, sometimes you really, honestly, do need to perform an actual COUNT. You just need to know exactly how many of rows there are. It may be 0, 1 or 75 or whatever, but you need to know exactly how many. These situations are few and far between, but every once in a long while this is what you need.

So, let’s give the COUNT function one last kick from another angle.

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The “IF COUNT = 1” Conundrum

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  • Reading time:10 mins read

If you haven’t read my yesterday’s post, then do that first.

Good. At this point you are extremely smart because you know that you should never use COUNT = 0 but should use ISEMPTY instead.

However, what if:

IF SomeTable.COUNT = 1 THEN
  DoSomething();

Well, if this is what you need, then that’s what you need. And that’s exactly what we needed in the team a few days ago.

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Are there any records there?

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  • Reading time:5 mins read

It’s been a while that I haven’t blogged, and my queue grows inversely proportional to the amount of time I have available for blogging, so let me do a short series of easy stuff, simply to take it off the list.

This is not about new features, crazy new tips and tricks or anything of the sort. It’s just a couple short lessons on performance and how to reduce your carbon footprint and make the planet last longer.

It’s about how to properly ask the database: are there any records there?

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