I generally don't make resolutions, especially at the end of a year. I'm more of a "make small changes, every day, that will make a big difference over a year" type person.  For blogs and communities, resolution making is a tradition and we all know that the holiday season is about traditions. So, dear data modelers, here are the resolutions I'd hope we'd all make for 2016. You wouldn't need to do all of them.  Just pick the ones you need to do. Make some of your own, then a plan to ma...

Yikes!  My last post was August 3rd!  My only excuse is that there is a certain product we have been working on around here that has been chewing up a “little bit“ of my time.  I actually haven't been finding the time to READ blogs, let alone write them.  Anyway, now that things are winding down around here I'm starting to catch up on things I've been putting off. I'm really impressed with the Bloglines news aggregator, it works very well for my blog reading style...

It seems my first post didn't actually get syndicated.  I really should have caught this myself but when I went add my own feed to my bloglines account I thought “that seems a little weird doesn't it, why would I want to read my own feed?“ and so I didn't do it.  Now I know there is a good reason to do it: To make sure it's working!. Especially when you are dealing with a blogging tool that leaves the door wide open for error.  Take a look at this screenshot from a part of the entry screen for c...

Let's face it: “Mark Edington's Blog” just doesn't have a whole lot of zip to it (not that this “Unknown Identifier“ thing is much better).  You see, several of my cohorts around here have these catchy little blog titles, so I'm under intense pressure to come up with something! For those of you who program with Delphi it may sound somewhat familiar:  If you are writing some code and misspell something or forget to declare something the compiler will complain about “...