From Michael Rosenblum’s blog a series of three posts on how to do a generic dynamic SQL search in PL/SQL with Native Dynamic SQL – the example does not use DBMS_SQL and uses bind variables to help optimize the query. In…
If you don’t ask, you will never find out why your system is performing poorly
We had a large operation that took up to a minute to run. It was copying data to a staging area, running over a thousand data validation rules (~50,000 lines of code), and then formatting all of the validation errors…
Business Rules Concepts 4th edition – by Ron Ross – Chapter 2 Review
This post is a review of the second chapter of Ron Ross’ new book Business Rules Concepts – 4th edition. The first two chapters can be downloaded. Here is where Ron Ross and I will have to respectfully agree to…
Blow it Up, Throw it Out, and Start Over
One of the hardest things to do in a systems project is to act on the knowledge that you are on a sub-optimal path. Notice that I am not even calling it a “mistake.” This just means that somewhere along…
Business Rules Concepts 4th edition – by Ron Ross – Chapter 1 Review
One of my employees asked me to review the latest edition of Ron Ross’ Business Rules Concepts book and discuss my thoughts. He offers a free download of the first two chapters of this 4th edition of his book. First, let me state…
Tagged with: Business rule, UML, Unified Modeling Language
Posted in BLOG, Business Rules, Publications
Posted in BLOG, Business Rules, Publications
Heath Care Information Technology (IT) – Death by a Thousand Clicks
For a sub-industry with so much money and attention being paid to it, I am surprised at how no one seems to be very happy with the results to date. We are working with doctors to design a next-generation IT…
Three More Reasons Why Software Projects Fail
Thirteen years ago I wrote a paper entitled “Top 10 Reasons Why Systems Projects Fail”. This has been my most requested paper. It was used at Harvard which eventually led to my company building the budget and finance system for…
Another Anecdote Supporting the Thick Database Approach
This post describes how our thick database approach helped us to easily identify performance issues within a new application. Dulcian’s BRIM-Objects includes an object modeling tool based on UML class diagrams. We built this tool over 10 years ago using…
The BEST IT Project Management Book Ever is: “If Disney Ran Your Hospital”
If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things you Would Do Differently (Fred Lee, 2004, Second River Healthcare) is not even an IT book. As the title suggests, it is about hospital administration. But no book has influenced my thinking about project…
Tagged with: customer satisfaction, Oracle, Project Management, Web service
Posted in About Dulcian, BLOG, Consulting, Other
Posted in About Dulcian, BLOG, Consulting, Other
Systems Analyst Techniques for Interviewing Users
About a million years ago, I wrote my doctoral dissertation about how to talk to computer system users. I videotaped 50 systems analysts talking to 50 different real estate brokers discussing the requirements for a system. I did formal protocol…
Tagged with: Business rule, requirements, Software development process, system analyst
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
