Some API "best suggestions"

In today’s modern world of computing it’s a no-brainer to expose some kind of service for the outside world to access your enterprise platform in a controlled fashion. Because of good old legacy systems, we all know that “the perfect world” never exists in any of our clients’ current environment. There are always compatibility issues regarding unified communication between these systems and we end up building all kinds of middle layers to facilitate this interaction. The latter makes it a nightmare to implement any kind of external service.

By building a platform with a collection of loosely coupled components and exposing specific functionality via an unified interface is much better than having all kinds of silo systems talking to each other. We can achieve this by implementing an API over REST (Representational state transfer).

Train yourself, yourself

Getting skilled up is the only way to stay alive in the IT services business, and the best way to do that is hands-on experience.  But it isn’t always easy to explore a new tech or skill if you are not working on a project that it is being used on, apart from time constraints the hardware and software you need may be lacking. So I decided to post a couple of things I`ve come across to help in this regard. And since I`m a SQL guy, I will focus on SQL type things.

I`m not saying formal, class based or course-type training is useless, it is great to introduce you to a new field and get you going quicker, but to become skilled, it will have to be some dirt under the nails stuff.
 

So let`s start at the beginning.

It Sounds Like...

Imagine a world where everyone had the spelling capability of a High School English teacher... Now snap out of it, because that's slightly delusional. Everybody makes the odd spelling mistake, especially when it comes to names, luckily there's a way in SQL to get around this...

Google Doodles Hacked... Well kind of...

When the Google Doodles were initially released during the Olympics I played every single game up to the point of absolute boredom. Then yesterday I was a bit bored and started going on a random Google spree and came across the games again and once again I decided to play them, then I thought... Why not try to automate this...

How to use CTE's

What is a CTE?

Basically a common table expression is a table that gets created and only lasts for the duration of that query. Once the query is executed, the table doesn't exist anymore. It can be self referenced and can be referenced multiple times in the same query.

Copy and paste programming

Copy and paste programming by Boipelo Rathebe

A couple a of weeks ago I had a very interesting chat with a java software developer friend of mine, who had just recently started the job and us just having a friendly chat around how he’s finding it, and to my surprise, or not, because  I am quite convinced that we all have found ourselves doing “it”. He tells me it is very hectic and this as a result has taken his friendship with google to a whole new level, so basically when he gets stuck he’ll just do an internet search on what he’s struggling with and hopefully get a suitable solution.

Database vs Data Warehouse

What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis. Often designed as OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) systems, these databases contain read-only data that can be queried and analysed far more efficiently as compared to your regular OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) application databases. In this sense an OLAP system is designed to be read-optimized.