I called in to Red-Gate the other day to see Andrew Clarke, the Simple-Talk subeditor. As I arrived, he was excitedly rummaging in Tony Davis's shoebox. This shoebox contains several contributions that time forgot. When Tony forgets one of my articles, it is usually his polite way of saying that it is beyond even his powers of rescue. What treasures lie therein? As we chatted, Andrew pulled out the following gem from an anonymous contributor whose identity is lost in the mists of time. I can see entirely how the healing process of amnesia kicked into Tony's conscious brain, but I feel that, at long last, it should be given life.

It goes as follows...

My Visit To Red-Gate

After all that time using SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare, it was exciting to get invited to go to Red Gate's prestigious International Headquarters in Cambridge, to give a short talk on 'Advanced Paging in SQL Server 2008'.

 Ah, Cambridge. What thoughts well up in one's minds' eye. What images are conjured up? The stone cloisters, the glittering spires, musty bookshops, vibrant Cafe-culture, and college chapels. Keen students in scarves and blazers, riding on bicycles, the sound of distant church bells.

 I eagerly imagined Red Gate's offices. The ivy clad walls, the oak bookcases, oil paintings of the founders severe in their Victorian dignity, the shambling donnish figures in tweed jackets and bottle glasses clutching well-thumbed books. A few museum cases lit by gothic stone windows.

  So it was rather a shock to arrive at the Science Park, on the Milton road, full of concrete and steel architecture. The Jeffries Building was a typical bold, uncompromising, modernist statement in chrome and glass by, one imagines, a little known architect determined to make a name as a radical force in the profession. I stepped up to the door which didn't open. A sign indicated that I should go to a door at the side, where were placed a number of bell pushes and a speakerphone grill. Inside the building, through the glass, I could see  a deserted hallway, lightly furnished with 'calming potted trees' , made of plastic, from the Viking Catalogue. Strangely, the fallen leaves in the hall were real.

 I may be sneered at as a country cousin, but I know what to do in such circumstances. You press the right button and, eventually, a strange squeaky voice like an owl being strangled comes from the grill. You say your name, there is a disembodied click, and the door opens.

 I stumbled across the hall to the toilet. Now, here is a tip for any visitor eager to impress the Red Gate people he has come to see. Be careful with the taps of the basin. Turn the tap on with anything less than extreme caution and a Niagara Falls of water sprays the front on ones trousers in an uncompromisingly modernist way. My trousers were drenched. I stared in the full-length mirror in horror: it looked as if I had just had an episode of severe incontinence.

 After hurriedly dabbing myself down with paper towels, I felt ready for the next task: finding Red Gate. No sign visible.

 This new task turned out to be easy, however. I simply resolved to follow the first geeky-looking person I spotted. Luckily, I stumbled across a perfect specimen, like a 'Far Side' cartoon made flesh. He wandered across the hall lost in strange esoteric thoughts and led me, inexorably, to Red Gate.

 Now, any follower of the old blog of  'Disgruntled Brian'  might mistakenly expect the Red Gate offices to be ringing with diabolic laughter as marketing people hatched duplicitous, cunning, plans, the air reeking with sulphur and the crackle of static electricity.   Unfortunately the marketing department were all out that day on a team building excercise. Instead, the sunlight flooded through the gaunt steel windows, illuminating a tranquil, meditative, scene as deskbound geeks tapped away thoughtfully at several keyboards and screens at once, as they constructed huge, complex applications

 Still dripping slightly down my trousers, I made my way to the stairs at the back of the office to get to the meeting room upstairs where my talk was to be held, nodding amiably at the Geeks.  The door closed behind me with a click. I went upstairs. The door on the first floor required a swipe card. No human effort would persuade it to open.  It was immovable. I retreated back downstairs. To my dismay, I realized that, to get back in, also required a swipe-card! Trapped in the stairwell. Through the window of the door, I  could see the Geeks placidly keying in intricate code. I tapped on the door, but their concentration was complete, and their iPods were on . After ten minutes, a startled geek found me sitting disconsolately on the stairs as the audience for my talk sat stolidly in the meeting room upstairs, talking amongst themselves.

 Back in the office, the next task was to get a swipe card so I could move unhindered through all doors. This was given to me by a charming lady who apologized for my predicament.  Back up the stairs I went, and presented the card smartly to the offending door, only to be assaulted by a series of beeps followed shortly by a loud ringing noise. I  was aghast. The Architect of the building, as an act of vengeance on a humanity he obviously despised, had put two sensors on the door, one of which opens the door, and the other of which sets the burglar alarm. In my haste to get through the door to start my talk, I got it wrong. The alarm had gone off, and as an added bonus, also triggered a buzzer in the local police station. Everyone was very nice about it.

 And so it was, that fifteen minutes late, dripping from my trousers, and leaving chaos downstairs as the car-park filled with patrol cars, I burst into the meeting room, to be met by the startled gaze of my audience.

 Someone leapt to his feet and shook my hand warmly. 'Did you find the place easily?' he asked affably. I stepped back to shake his hand . My back  struck the partition wall of the meeting room. It made a crashing noise like the last trump, and woke a nearby dozing  support engineer in the open-plan area outside the meeting room.  Various  sales people looked up, startled, from their work. 

'Oh yes, fine, no problems at all', I replied.

 

One of the funnier malapropisms that have recently emerged from Microsoft’s Marketing arm is the word ‘Actionable’ . You can see how it happened. They wanted a word that sounded vaguely a ‘good thing’ without being too precise. We all like things we can act on don’t we. ‘Actionable' sounds good eh?

 

‘… to provide IT managers with an actionable set of prescriptive guidelines for improving operations…’

(http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A030626B-C2E4-4D7C-AB75-832D360C86ED&displaylang=en)

‘… Deliver Actionable Insight Throughout Your Organization with Data Mining…’

(http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032355543&CountryCode=US)

‘… Actionable audience intelligence and effective targeting technologies are essential for marketers.’

(http://advertising.microsoft.com/research/travel-marketing-i)

‘… delivered real-time actionable information needed to help grow a business through search engine…’

(http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk/advertising-events?Adv_EventID=97)

 ‘…It offers easy inventory, powerful assessment and actionable recommendations for Windows Server 2008, …’

(http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=297)

 

Oops.  Typically of the purveyors of word salad, they didn’t check their dictionaries first. In this case they got it comically wrong.

 

Actionable has a definite and precise meaning in both American English and in Queens English that is well known in the Legal Profession.  If you say, or do, something Actionable, it means you could be sued for it.  To quote from Webster, ‘furnishing grounds for a lawsuit’.  www.TheFreeDictionary.com talks of Actionable  meaning  ‘affording grounds for legal action’, giving the example  "slander is an actionable offense", and gives the synonym ‘unjust - violating principles of justice’. The Oxford English Dictionary yields only one meaning: ‘Subject or liable to an action at law. Of such a character that an action on account of it will lie’, and gives examples going back to the seventeenth century. To be fair, recent Websters have listed an ancillary meaning of ‘capable of being acted upon or readily used’, but it may just be a response to a frequently used malapropism. No, if you key the word ‘actionable’ into the Wikipedia,  you are straight into  the realms of Litigation.

 

So sit back and read the marketing blurb with a lighter heart and a new cheerfulness. They are, unintentionally, telling you that the stuff they’re trying to sell you will get you sued!

Once upon a time, in a land .far off  to the west of Krakatoa called Java, .there lived three little pigs. They were called by the unique identifiers John, jOhn, and johN. The first little pig was known to his devoted parents as piglet[0], the second as piglet[1] and the third as piglet[2].

Unfortunately the pigsty was too small, due to inadequate requirements-gathering at the time of construction, a familiar anti-pattern. The old sow said, ‘Now my dears, upon reflection, we seem to have a scalability problem. We need therefore create a distributed architecture. I have no inheritance, so you must to go off into the woods and build your own homes.. But, whatever you do, make them resilient and beware of the Big Bad Tester, for he will huff, and puff, and blow them away’.

So the three little piglets all went tearfully out onto the road to look for a suitable platform on which to base their architecture. The first little pig met a man with some java beans.

 “Would you like to buy some of my beans in return for a cow?”

“No fear, My mother told me the story of a little pig called Jack who bought some of your beans, had a big scalability issue with the resulting tree structure and had Gigantic problems as a result.’

Then the little pig,  piglet[‘John’]  ( or piglet[0]), met a man with a cart of straw. ‘This looks to me to be a component that can be manipulated visually as a builder tool.’ He said gleefully. I can make a nice property with this! So he bought the straw, and extended the house base class with straw, using late bindings, and settled down contentedly in a local field, relishing the persistence of his house object.

Then along came the tester, who said ‘Is this house of production quality? The little pig said, ‘Of course, lets’ ship it, by the hair of my chinny chin chin’.. So the tester smiled with glee and caused an unhandled exception by huffing and puffing and causing an array-out-of-bounds. Piglet[0] wiped the straw from his hair, exclaiming ‘It must be a hardware fault. I haven’t touched that module in weeks’. Perhaps he should have used curly braces.

The second little pig wandered down a lane and came across a farmer hauling a load of Sticks I shall build a fantastick house! He cried, and bought the sticks from the farmer. The house class had multiple constructors, and he overrode the wall methods for sticks..

After great effort, he sat down in his house of sticks, contented. At that moment the big bad tester knocked on the door. ‘Little Pig, Little pig, let me come in.

“No, No, said the little pig, By the hair of my chinny chin chin, I will not let you come in. The door is a critical section with an exclusive lock.’

“But we have to check the house’s resilience.” Pleaded the Tester,”It needs to undergo stress-testing”’.

“..but I’ve used Agile Methodology in developing this house!”, the pig expostulated.

But the Tester just laughed. He then huffed and he puffed, causing a null reference exception thrown up to the top level thereby causing premature object decomposition.

Piglet[1]  ran squealing from a pile of sticks exclaiming “I thought I fixed that. Somebody must have changed the code”.

The third little pig, piglet[2], decided that his two brothers had practiced a number of antipatterns, and determined to select a resilient architecture with bricks. As you generally hear far more about the successful developments in Java, I suspect I have no need to go into the details because you'll have already been told them. You will know that the Testers even climbed down the chimney to try to cause the system integrity to fail. All to no avail.  The Big Bad Tester had an unfortunate accident whilst regression-testing the roof Struts, and the third little pig lived happily ever after.

A while back, I had to review a book by an ‘award-winning’ author. It was an excellent book. I phoned the writer to get some background information and to try to ascertain whether my assumptions about the author’s background knowledge were right. ‘That award you won… What was it?’

‘Oh, just one of those awards you know, like the Whitbread, or the Booker.’

‘…and its name?’ I pressed, baffled by his vagueness,

‘Well, if you must know, I awarded it to myself,’ He confessed.

I remarked on his initiative.

‘Yes, the established literary cartels were slow in coming forward to recognise new and interesting talent, due to their entrenched self-interest, so I pre-empted them and awarded myself a literary prize. It has done wonders for my book sales and everyone seems impressed. Even my mother refers to it to her friends.’

We moved on to other topics, but before we ended the call, he said ' You know, there were two strange things about that award, …Firstly, after I awarded it to myself, I felt oddly elated, as if some august academic body had suddenly realised my true worth as an author and had strained every sinew to ensure that my talent was acknowledged. ' ’

Pause

‘… and what was the other strange thing?’

‘You are the first person ever to have asked me precisely what award it was that I’d won. Everybody else has just taken it for granted.’

‘I work in IT. It makes one cautious of trusting qualifications and awards.’

We parted on excellent terms. He recently sent me his latest book, a bestseller by an award-winning novelist.

Awards are tricky things to get right. For an award to be universally supported, it has to have a transparent and scrupulously independent selection process. Nobel, Booker and Whitbread occasionally get it right, but then you’d be very hard pushed to find a Nobel prize-winner for Literature in your bookshelf or made into a Movie. Elias Canetti? Toni Morrison? Pearl Buck? Heinrich Böll?

Professional awards in general are a minefield. The checks and balances that have to be put in place in order to make the selection and nomination process fair and visible are Byzantine in their complexity. The election processes are always constructed to prevent any hint of a possibility of unfair influence.

I find the Microsoft MVP ‘award’ troubling. This is nothing to do with the MVPs themselves. I have many good friends who are annually, and with excellent judgement, awarded MVP status for their excellent work. People who are MVPs seem to know their specialised subject well. For all you know, I may even be an MVP myself. That has nothing to do with the fact that the MVP ‘gong’ itself is an insidious thing. The M at the beginning is enough to impress anybody’s aunt. MSc, MBE, MBA, MVP. It looks like it is a Master of something or other. It masquerades as an academic or professional award. Traditionally, MVP was the ‘most valued player’ in a baseball team, chosen by the rest of the team. In IT, the MVP is promoted and funded by one commercial organisation, and the final selection of MVPs is made by employees of that organisation in closed session. The M either stands for ‘Microsoft’ or ‘Most’, depending on who you ask.

‘Each year a panel of Microsoft employees reviews the contributions of each nominee for quality, quantity, and level of impact on the technical community.’ (from the MVP website)

The award is given annually, and a recipient cannot claim the ‘qualification’ after the year is up unless re-nominated and re-selected, the ‘Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’. It is, I suppose, a good way of ensuring ‘the expectations of courtesy, professionalism, code of conduct, and adherence to the community rules’. However, ask yourself this, could it also be a way of pitching the loose canons overboard? 

Imagine that Microsoft has decided to take yet another slice of the IT market, in an area previously dominated by another player. Let us, for the sake of argument, imagine that Microsoft has produced a product, we'll call it Silverlight for the sake of argument, which takes on Adobe's Flash. This isn't our concern. We can look at the two offerings, and look at Adobe AIR, the commercial response to Silverlight, and make a judgement, based on merit, on how the two products fit with requirements. However, as an MVP, can one then blog on the superiority of the Adobe AIR package without the nagging thought that the panel of those Microsoft employees are going to make sucking sounds through their teeth, shake their heads sadly, and move onto the next nominee the next time your name comes up?

‘Eloquent, yes, but is he really singing from the same hymn sheet? Is he really the sort of Microsoft Valued Professional we want?’ The influence of Marketing has an insidious way of penetrating ‘Chinese walls’.

In reality, Microsoft would never actually have to ‘pull the choke-chain’ at all. There will always be that small lingering doubt in the mind of the MVP who wants to stay an MVP. ‘Would that upset them?’ It is the whole basis of the award which is wrong rather than the way it is implemented and run.

I realise that the vast majority of people who receive the award have put good selfless service into assisting the community of people who are using Microsoft products. Nobody is saying that the award is equivalent to Reginald Molehusband’s CDM. Can, though, anyone who puts the letters MVP after their name be, in addition,  accepted as an independent industry expert, or do the three letters just mean that the person has 'got the ring though the nose’?

Naturally, the answer is ‘The thought of Microsoft’s reaction makes not a hoot of difference in what the average MVP will do or say. The letters MVP mean that the recipient has worked hard to support the community, rather than act as an unpaid cheerleader for Microsoft. The award merely shows that the recipient knows the particular Microsoft product he got the award for, and has used it to help the community of users: nothing more.’ Why then dress it up to make it look like more than it really is? Sadly, perception is everything, and it could well be the perception of the IT indiustry as a whole that you’ve ‘Taken the Soup’.

One of the signs of increasing age in the IT industry is that of 'déjà vu'. New things that are laboriously explained to you ring all sorts of bells. The past flashes before one's eyes.

I visited a company developing Internet-based applications the other day. They were proud of their progressiveness and explained to me that they developed database systems using the radical new Agile XP (Extreme Programming) methodology. Wow, I thought. That must have impressed the shareholders. Perhaps they don't realize that Agile XP is known in the industry as 'Cowboy Coding'.

I feigned ignorance, which is not usually hard for me to do.

'Well,' said my genial and pleasant host, 'one of the great things about Agile XP is that one tests every part of your code as soon as you've written it and you don't go on to the next bit until it has been thoroughly tested. Flaws in the system are easily communicated by writing a unit test that proves a certain piece of code will break.'

'Gosh! You mean you test your code rather than just write it?'.

'Ingenious isn't it. When writing code, the unit test provides direct feedback as to how the system reacts to the changes one has made. If, for instance, the changes affect a part of the system that is not in the scope of the programmer who made them, that programmer will not notice the flaw. There is a large chance that this bug will appear when the system is in production.'

'Funny how nobody has ever thought of this before.' My face goes red when I'm desperately trying to stop myself guffawing with laughter. What I love best about working in IT is its rich unintended comedy. My host misunderstood my visceral difficulties as excitement

'Because you can never be certain that what you coded is what you meant XP uses what it calls 'Unit Tests'. These are automated tests that test the code. The programmer will try to write as many tests he or she can think of that might break the code he or she is writing; if all tests run successfully then the coding is complete, and the programmer can then go on to develop more code.'

My eyes bulged. My face flushed red.

Seeing how interested I was he proudly produced an elaborate Java-based module he'd written that provided a test harness for SQL queries and procedure. 'It is great, you can change the parameters in the query (Klop Klop Klop on the keyboard) just type in what results you expect', (Klop Klop Klop Klop), 'and then Run the test harness' (Klop Klop Klop Klop Klop Klop)

Various windows flashed on the screen in front of me, full of inscrutable commands. It was all very 'Seventies'.

Finally a message popped up from the depths saying 'OK'. He was so proud; it could have been his baby.

'Look, all we have to do is to change SQL code a bit in order to simulate an error and you'll see what happens!'

(Klop Klop Klop Klop Klop Klop)

Wow. An error message popped up saying there was an error in the code.

'To think that, for all these years, we've been doing it so stupidly' I sighed, shaking my head in mock-regret. I'm afraid I wasn't able to show him the way that a SQL Programmer like myself would go around doing the same thing in their humble rudimentary way. I hope I explained enough to suggest that that perhaps there has been some sort of primitive thought before the genesis of Agile XP.

Before you write code, you write a test-harness. (it is often best to get someone else to do it, preferably someone with malice in their soul). When you write the piece of SQL code, such as a function, you append the test harness for unit-testing purposes. In some places I've worked, you'd be given a rough time at code-review if these were missing or inadequate. Here is an example…. (normally, you comment out the test harness when the code is 'put to bed' and the GO moved to the end, so that the harness stays with the code, or you can, in SQL Server, save it as an extended property.)

-- =============================================
-- Author:		Phil Factor
-- Create date: 
-- Description:	Reverse Charindex. Gives the index
-- INTO the string OF the LAST occurence OF the 
-- substring
-- =============================================
ALTER FUNCTION [dbo].[rCharindex] --reverse Charindex
(
   -- Add the parameters for the function here
   @needle VARCHAR(80),    --the substring
   @HayStack VARCHAR(8000) --the string
)
RETURNS INT
AS
BEGIN
   IF @needle+@Haystack IS NULL RETURN NULL
   IF CHARINDEX(@needle,@haystack)=0 RETURN 0
   RETURN COALESCE(LEN(REPLACE(@haystack,' ','|'))
             -CHARINDEX(REVERSE(@needle),
                       REVERSE(@needle+@haystack)
                       )
              -LEN(REPLACE(@needle,' ','|'))+2,0)

END
GO
DECLARE @Test VARCHAR(80)
SET @Test='First test'----------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('this','This can NOT be a thistle ')
   <> 19
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)
SET @Test='Second test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('pr',
  '  May the lord preserve me from the priests of the IT industry  ')
   <> 37
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)
SET @Test='Third test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('l',
  '...who maintain an evangelical following.. ')
   <> 35
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)
SET @Test='Fourth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex (NULL,
  '...by waving their hands a lot.. ')
   IS NOT NULL
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)
SET @Test='Fifth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex (' without their ties on.',NULL)
   IS NOT NULL
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)
SET @Test='Sixth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('','')
   <>0
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   
SET @Test='Seventh test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('','and looking sincere')
   <>0
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   
SET @Test='Eighth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('but it adds to life''s rich humour','')
   <>0
SET @Test='Ninth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('Klop','so perhaps one should be tolerant')
   <>0
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   
SET @Test='Tenth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex ('Klop','KlopKlopKlop ')
   <>9
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   
SET @Test='Eleventh test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex (' Klop ','Klop Klop Klop ')
   <>10
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   
SET @Test='Twelveth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex (' ','      ')
   <>6
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   

SET @Test='Thirteenth test'---------------------------
IF dbo.rcharindex (' ! ',' ! !!!  !  !!!     ')
   <>8
   RAISERROR ('Failed the %s',16,1,@test)   

There are many cleverer ways of doing it but I blush to think of the stupid bugs that this sort of system catches, that slip through casual testing.