Dulcian was tasked with creating a very complex data entry application (filling out the entire application for entrance into the military) that a senior in high school could use with no training whatsoever. The application needed to be attractive, easy to…
Making a data entry application look like a real website
Tagged with: code generator, design, Web application
Posted in Clients, Consulting, Development, Products
Posted in Clients, Consulting, Development, Products
“We don’t want to be dependent upon Oracle.”
I have lost a lot of projects due the little sentence: “We don’t want to be dependent upon Oracle.” (I just lost another one this week.) It has been used to justify all sorts of crazy decisions such as: Spend millions of…
Tagged with: Database management system, DBMS, Oracle, Total cost of ownership
Posted in Consulting, Development, Products, Resources, Training
Posted in Consulting, Development, Products, Resources, Training
Normalization Still Matters in System Design
When I wrote Oracle8 Design for UML Object Modeling in 1998, Martin Fowler was my technical editor. I remember having a very serious discussion with him about whether normalization mattered for UML class diagrams. If you look at Martin’s diagrams in his writings,…
Business Rules – Object Rules
Object rules are the primary type of rule with which we have to concern ourselves. They include everything we can say about the “stuff” in our system. Database people would call these entities; OO people would call them classes. “Stuff” is the…
Tagged with: Business rule, Class diagram, Data model, UML, Unified Modeling Language, User interface, Validation rule
Posted in Consulting, Development
Posted in Consulting, Development
Business Rules Architecture
Business rules people may not really like this architecture. It is pretty technical. But I am not trying to build pretty documents, draw pictures, or talk to users for the sake of making them feel loved and understood. I am…
Tagged with: Business process, Business rule, Data validation, Extract transform load, User interface
Posted in Consulting, Development
Posted in Consulting, Development
The Business Rules Perspective
“Business Rules” is not simply a technology, it is a fundamentally different approach to systems engineering. Years ago, when I first heard the term “business rules,” I remember thinking that we had some up with a new buzzword meaning the same…
Tagged with: Business rule, Business rules approach, Unified Modeling Language
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Changes in direction that the IT industry should have never made
From where the industry was when I started Dulcian back in 1995 to where it is today, I have seen massive changes in direction. Many of these changes make me miss the “good old days”. I would like to point…
Tagged with: Business rule, Commercial off-the-shelf, Database design, Open source
Posted in Consulting, Development
Posted in Consulting, Development
Don’t be thick – Use a “Thick Database” approach
The trend in recent years has been to decrease reliance on the DBMS (database management system). Using this approach, all code and logic gets moved to the middle tier. The database becomes nothing more than “a place to store persistent…
And the #1 killer of performance in a web application is…
OK, sure, if you write a query that takes 10 minutes, then your performance is going to be terrible. But of all the systems I have seen, usually there is somebody around who can both detect a long running query…
Tagged with: Application server, Database, Multitier architecture, Servers, thick database, web application development
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Using UML Class Diagrams as a Data Modeling Tool
I have the dubious honor of having written the first ever book about UML data modeling (Oracle8 Database Design Using UML Object Modeling – 1998 Oracle Press). It was written to support the then new object extensions in Oracle8. Of course, no…
Tagged with: Class diagram, Data model, Oracle Designer, UML
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
Posted in BLOG, Consulting, Development
