The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (pronounced Hip-ner-AH-toe-mak-ee-a
Poh-LI-fi-ly) is an ancient text that is the subject of a da Vinci Code
style best seller named Rule Of Four. This obscure text, completed in
1499, is clearly the work of someone versed in multiple disciplines;
architecture, music, painting, gardening and relationships. The
nearly unpronounceable title can be translated "struggle for love in a
dream," revealing Poliphilo’s love for the woman who shunned
him, Polia. The author is unknown.
What does this have to do with the book, In the Trenches with SQL
Server & .NET? Plenty!
Last month I received an email from the publisher of
this new "In the Trenches" series book, asking if I would be
interested in reviewing it. Since I am currently hip deep in a
SQL Server / .NET project, I was happy to oblige and anxiously
awaited my copy. Coincidentally, when it arrived I happened to
be reading Rule of Four and the similarity wasn’t lost on me.
To begin with, I had never heard of the book’s publisher, Beyond
Books, and its author is still unknown to me, having taken upon
himself the obscure moniker, The Saint. However, by
the time I had read a third of this 600-page work, I realized I was in
for more than a simple code review. The author expounds on
programming conventions, methodologies, soft skills and oh yeah, there are
some great code solutions too. In the review that follows, I point
out some features of the book that I liked and some I loathed. You
can check it out for yourself with the published sample chapters at their
web site: In the Trenches with SQL Server & .NET
Before we get to the code …
The first things you notice are the quotes that precede each
section. My favorite comes near the end of the book under the chapter
on Tools. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, "If I had 8
hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend 6 sharpening the axe." I
love that quote, and as a developer, I live by it.
Particularly in this chapter, but throughout the book, The Saint
describes some of the best tools for developing SQL Server solutions with
.NET. The first suggestion I put into practice revolutionized my
development landscape: I began using Visual Studio .NET to develop my
stored procedures. The book not only explains how to implement this
solution, but why. This suggestion alone could pay for the book ten
times over.
The second thing I noticed is that the format and
content of this "In the Trenches" book is genuinely unique and
its "trenches" claim is justified. In fact, the premise of
the book is that the best tips learned in the trenches are not freely
distributed.
What most people don’t realize is that the truly
advanced & valuable techniques are NOT SHARED OR PROVIDED out on the
public domain. This element is rarely discussed and only the top pros
& experts are privy to this.
I have to admit that I am not sure if I believe this. I have
participated in news groups where no one appeared to hold back valuable
advice, direction or code to newbies who asked for help. On the
other hand, one might argue that we who monitor news groups and read tech
books could not possibly be aware of what volume of wisdom is
being withheld and I suppose there is some truth to that assertion.
An example might be the author’s emphasis on methodologies, such as
FDD (Feature
Driven Development). Oddly enough, I no sooner read the section
on Agile Development when my team leader approached me about an article he
had read on the subject, moving him to suggest such a change in our
methodology. The Saint took this "trench warfare" one
step further, developing and describing his own flavor of this methodology,
which he calls FDSD (Feature Driven Software Development). He admits
that there is a dearth of tools on the market to help one implement either
of these methodologies and their exact definitions are still in the process
of evolution. The book includes a suggestion for how one might
track development features/tasks using standard Microsoft tools like Excel
or Access. Implementing evolving methodologies, I suppose, is kind of
like performing surgery at a M.A.S.H. verses those done at the Mayo Clinic.
The Saint raised my hackles in the chapter on
Soft Skills. While discussing how to make office politics work for
you, he quoted Machiavelli who said,
"… it is easy to enter [kingdoms] by winning
over some baron of the Kingdom, there being always malcontents, and those
desiring innovations. These can, for the reasons stated, open the
way to facilitate victory …"
Once again, I concede that the author may be on target, but it is
simply not my experience. The office is not a battleground and others
are not inherently my enemies. I am at war with no
one and I do not believe that donning such an attitude
will advance my career. If your experience more closely
parallels that of the author, then this section of the book is for
you. Personally, I stopped reading after the Machiavelli quote.
Ahhh … the code
To me, the code is what it is all about, and I was by no means
disappointed. Mind you, I am an experienced developer with years of
T-SQL coding behind me but while reviewing one of the first snippets of
code in the book I stumbled across a simple but elegant way of handling
optional parameters. You know what I’m talking about. Something
like this:
create proc
AgentSalesSummary (@AgentID int = null) as
select a.FName + ' ' + a.LName as AgentName,
sum(s.SaleAmt) as Sales,
sum(s.SaleAmt)/sum(s.LoginHrs) as SalesPerHour
from AgentSales s inner join Agents a
on a.AgentID = s.AgentID
where s.AgentID=@AgentID
group by a.FName, a.LName
In this proc, @AgentID is required if you want to return summary data
for ONE agent, but what do you do if you want records for ALL agents?
I handled this by passing -1 to represent all agents, but this is not
intuitive and adds an order of magnitude to the complexity of the
above code. The Saint accomplished the same
thing by adding less than 20 characters to a single line in
the above script. (If you are curious, write
me and I’ll send you the solution.)
The great part of this whole thing is that my boss, also a .NET
developer on our team, called me into his office to help him solve an issue
he was having with a stored proc that required an optional parameter.
I quickly revealed the solution I had read in the book, In the Trenches
with SQL Server & .NET and my boss, after pondering its simplicity
and elegance, agreed that his problem was solved. Again, the book
paid for itself.
While there were numerous suggestions and code snippets for which I have
no immediate use, there were a couple that address real life issues that I
face today. One was a suggestion of how to implement alerts from SQL
Server using xp_cmdshell and Net Send. I now have
a simple but powerful process for sending messages over the
network to admin users who need to be informed of the condition of certain
databases.
The last helpful code solution I will mention is something I desperately
needed but had put on the back burner until I found time to
research a solution. My current project is a reporting application
that sometimes takes a long time to return data. Users have asked for
a CANCEL button so they can abort requests that are taking a long time
but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I was sure it could be implemented
with threading, but I had never worked with the .NET threading object so I
didn’t even know where to begin. The code in this
"trenches" book addressed that specific problem and supplied some
really slick code–code that will definitely make it into the next release
of my reporter app.
Should you buy this book?
As you can see, I had mixed feelings about this book. Not the
least of my reservations was the price. It carries a list price of
$150 but is being sold at the introductory price of $129. That is a
little steep, but the author and publishers feel it is worth it.
Depending on your hourly rate, you may too. I figure the code
leveraged from the book saved me 6 to 8 hours of development time
already. At my consulting rate, that pays for the book several times
over.
In addition, there are the intangible benefits such as improved
development techniques, better programming practices and the sheer pleasure
I derived from reading the book. It may not be the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
but In the Trenches with SQL Server & .NET may be just the
obscure text you need in your ‘struggle for excellence’ as a SQL Server
developer.
