Generating Production Volume Data with SQL Data Generator
I’m sure if I had a nickel for each time a software project was impacted by introducing production volume data into the testing life cycle either too late, or worse even – not at all, I’d be a rich man and wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. When you think about it, it’s really no wonder that we find ourselves in this situation. Developers new to the craft have no experience to draw on dealing with millions of rows of data. Experienced developers and DBAs often pass on war stories of hand crafted scripts and the perils of migrating data from production to lower environments, further reinforcing the belief that emulating production volumes of data is work restricted to the gods of IT.
WordPress on IIS7
I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to WordPress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to WordPress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.
The Twitter Book
Since jumping back on the blogging bandwagon, I’ve been looking to get more familiar with the top social networking sites. I’ve had some experiences with most of the major players except Twitter, which I never did manage to get into. I decided to give Twitter a fair chance and see if it worked for me. In order to do this, I felt some basic background / guidance was necessary before jumping in heads-first. Turns out that The Twitter Book from Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein was really all that I needed. My Amazon review follows: