I am getting back into the groove, catching up on all those interesting blog entries and web articles which I missed in Canada, not because I didn't have internet access, just my whole RSS feed reader wasn't there, neither were my bookmarks/favourites. My setup is the result of many hours of filtering which I don't need to spend time remembering (unless I need to).
I am working from home in the interim, which has been great, depending on what I am doing I enjoy working or studying to some music. As I have mentioned in the past pandora provides a great resource of music. I tend to listen to a genre called vocal trance which is basically dance music, other times it might be classical, jazz or even metal in various forms. I like my music to be packed with plenty of action and depth.
Here are couple of articles worth reading:I find the area on constraint programming interesting, there is a prolog Sudoku solver as well which uses a similar method using prolog constraints to solve the puzzles. The idea that the program moves forward and reduces the problem set might be useful in tuning situations where the need to eliminate non-issues (sometimes in a hurry) is important.
Lots of developers have issues with using constraints in databases, mainly relating to error handling. That is kinda weird as the database model is really an expression of a business or application model. i.e. a sale must have a product and a customer.
Foreign key, unique and check constraints allow the database to police those business rules (or constraints) so that the data remains accurate, without depending on any application.
In some sense the data model provides insight into the business. What problem (for the customer) is business trying to solve...
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