Career Advice

The value of any advice is tied to the degree of its relevance to your particular situation and circumstances. Very specific advice, like legal and medical advice, is very expensive. It is very relevant to the individual’s situation and therefore quite valuable. The degree of relevance of inexpensive/free advice to your specific circumstances is usually very low. Inexpensive/free advice, as in sayings and quotes, but also in everyday personal and business communication, is very generic. The same message is usually perceived differently by different people. Especially when the entire message is very succinct and pithy. Various aspects of the message are accentuated differently as it is filtered through individual perception. Developing a sense of how generic advice applies to your […]

Database Schema Version Control Tool

It is essential to treat database schema as source code and apply all the norms and best practices applicable to it. From what I hear and read, database schema version control is non-existent in too many projects. Various techniques to accomplish version control of database schemas have been discussed and published. Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadagale has written a comprehensive article on Evolutionary Database Design. It is a must-read for everyone involved with database development. K. Scott Allen writes in detail about an excellent system here – Versioning Databases – Change Scripts. This approach is sufficiently light-weight (for my taste) and provides complete control over the whole process. I am providing a free tool here that you can use to […]