Enterprise Application Performance

IT professionals including server and storage managers often think that the adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise puts their jobs in danger. To the contrary, the role of the IT professional is evolving into a more strategic position as more organizations adopt private and public cloud, with many using a combination of the two, which is often referred to as hybrid cloud. Recent reports suggest that the cloud will result in increased career advancement for IT professionals both in terms of responsibility and job opportunities. IT professionals should embrace the cloud, not fear it. Consider surfers who once rejected surf board leashes as "kook chords," dismissing them as unnecessary. However, as is the case with many innovations, the "kook chord" has gradually become a reliable standard used by virtually every surfer today. Let's be blunt: IT is a terrible ... (more)

Why Averages Are Inadequate, and Percentiles Are Great

Anyone who ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real-world example outside of the performance space that I read recently in a newspaper. The article was explaining that the average salary in a certain region in Europe was 1900 Euro's (to be clear this would be quite good in that region!). However when looking closer they found out that the majority, namely 9 out of 10 people, only ea... (more)

The PowerBuilder .NET IDE

For the past year plus I've been spending a lot of time working with a web-based BI tool (the development is actually done in a plug-in to Eclipse, but the end users access the results through a browser). The tool reminds me a lot of the DataWindow. You create objects that can either map directly to a database table or are based on textual SQL. Those objects are then combined into a composite object that the user can access to do ad-hoc queries without having to know how the underlying tables are related. The data connection is abstracted from the data access layer, and the repor... (more)

Appeon Developer Configuration

Have you ever used a datastore that ran without a problem while you were developing your application, but once you've compiled it stopped running? Let me tell you that's a difficult bug to fix. I remember it so well. I kept going back and forth. How in the world could the DataWindow work at design time yet not in the executable? I remember that I checked the return value of the datastore. I finally noticed that the datastore returned a -1. That's such a strange thing. The datastore returns the number of rows that were returned or a -1. The help files used to say that a -1 was in ... (more)

Elegant Programming: Code Writing Style | Part 2

Local Variables Declaration Declare local variables in the beginning (on the top) of the function, before the first executable line. This will: Make it easier to detect all the variables used in the function and to follow them Keep as little stuff as possible in executable code fragments, where programmers should concentrate on business logic. The declaration of a local variable is not an executable command in PowerBuilder. The memory is allocated on the stack exactly at the moment when the function is called together with the parameters. It doesn't make sense to declare a variabl... (more)