Initial Expectations

How hard could it be?  A new Data Mart was being constructed for a national health care provider and the client activity reports used on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis needed to be modified to use this new Data Mart and report this new aggregate data.  I thought this project was going to be simple and straightforward.  I had never been a part of a Business Intelligence remediation effort before, but how hard could it be?  The logic was already complete. The reports were already built.  The combination of both these elements was already tried, tested, and in production.  All that needed to be done was rename some tables, update some column names and update the database targets, right?  Could it really be as simple as a using Find & Replace?

Common Challenges

Due to vacation schedules and lots of other things going on this summer, "next week" has turned into "next month" for this final post in my top 10 series. Today's subject may be a little surprising to many developers: Aren't buffer overflows so 2003? Hasn't this been fixed in virtually all modern programming languages by preventing direct memory access? While the second statement is certainly true, it doesn't mean that today's developers don't need to be aware of buffer overflows, especially when interacting with closed-source and/or legacy software written in languages that allow arbitrary memory access (C and C++ being the most common examples).