Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Ten SQL Server Functions That You Hardly Use But Should

In order to see what rows are in table 1 and not in table 2 and vice versa you can do 2 left joins, 2 right joins or 1 left and 1 right join. To get the rows that are different you can use BINARY_CHECKSUM.

Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis

This post was originally published on the author’s personal site. It is reproduced here with permission from the author. In the movie Die Hard with a Vengeance (aka Die Hard 3), there is this famous scene where John McClane (Bruce Willis) and Zeus Carver (Samuel L.

Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics)

This video visually demonstrates some basic quantum physics concepts using the simple case of a free particle. All the simulations here are based on real equations and laws. See more information here: http://www.zutopedia.com/quantum_phys...The mathematics involved was taken from this excellent book

Fundamentals of Fast Bulk IO

The simplest way for a program to read/write a chunk of file is to allocate a buffer for the data, issue a request to the OS and then sit there and wait until it is fullfiled. Once the data is in (or out), proceed to the next step.

Writing good code: how to reduce the cognitive load of your code

Low bug count, good performance, easy modification. Good code is high-impact, and is perhaps the main reason behind the existence of the proverbial 10x developer. And yet, despite it’s importance, it eludes new developers.

Many SQL Performance Problems Stem from “Unnecessary, Mandatory Work”

Probably the most impactful thing you could learn about when writing efficient SQL is indexing. A very close runner-up, however, is the fact that a lot of SQL clients demand tons of “unnecessary, mandatory work” from the database.

How Modern SQL Databases Come up with Algorithms that You Would Have Never Dreamed Of by Lukas Eder

SQL is the only ever successful, mainstream, and general-purpose 4GL (Fourth Generation Programming Language) and it is awesome!With modern cost based optimisation, relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL finally keep up to the promise of a powerful declarative programming model by

How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]?

Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood.

When everything you know is wrong, part two

Myth: Keeping a reference to an object in a variable prevents the finalizer from running while the variable is alive; a local variable is always alive at least until control leaves the block in which the local was declared.

When everything you know is wrong, part one

Finalizers are interesting and dangerous because they are an environment in which everything you know is wrong. I’ve written a lot about the perils of C# finalizers / destructors (either name is fine) over the years, but it’s scattered in little bits over the internet.