You're Doing it Wrong

Well, the release is completed, and I'm extremely glad in this.  This one pushed my sql knowledge to its limits and beyond.  The system I code against has a very complicated security model with five, yes five, different types of security.  The last one was added in this release.  On paper it didn't look very complex, I found out that it made my security checks exponentially more difficult.  My query that retrieves items from the tree that the current user can view, when printed out in Notepad with the standard margins, is eleven pages.  Eleven.  E-lev-en.  It returns multiple recordsets with all the data I need, so the security related WHERE's constitute about 3/4ths of the bulk of the queries.  Obviously, the security model greatly reduces the scalability of the system.

We're working on it. 

Wish I could go more into detail, but everything is sketchy at this point.  I'm working on the development direction we are taking for our line of products for the next two years.  In fact, I should be in Visio right now, laying out the inputs and outputs for our core system.  I've been doing my best to put it off today, but I've run out of other stuff to do.  This is the last thing I do before I hit it hard.

While I'm just talking randomly about stuff that's going on, let me take a moment to give praise to the greatness that are whiteboards.  Behind my desk I have a 6x4 whiteboard mounted on the wall.  It used to reside out in the warehouse at our former locatiton.  After I got hired, I was poking around back there and saw it sitting in the corner, neglected and lonely.  Its the kind that has a grid permanently laid out ontop of it.  Black lines in a pattern that creates cells that are roughly 1x2 inches.  I immediately hauled it in and stuck it up on the wall next to my desk.  It has been invaluable in my work.  Every time I need to get something out of my mind I turn around and write it out on the whiteboard.  Items that are no longer needed get erased; items that need to be kept get photographed with my camera phone and sent to a folder on my work machine.  Currently its got a diagram on it that shows the relationships between all our different products and services that are in the planning.  Its a hell of a lot easier to diagram this kind of thing out on a whiteboard than on paper or in Visio directly. 

Anyhow, I've got to get back to it.  I've got to get some handlers nailed down.