Today I’m looking at solutions to Magic Numbers. Magic numbers are hard coded numbers (or references) which appear in scripts and procedures, they creep in very easily. I don’t think that magic numbers are entirely bad. If you have a stored procedure which modifies data for a specific customer, having the one customer ID in…
If an ID or reference is used more than once in a process, it’s best to store it in a variable and reference that. This can slow down debugging, but makes a process far more portable. It also reduces the number of magic numbers in a process (or at least times they are defined). I…
Part of managing data is cleaning text. Tabs, spaces and line breaks can sneak in, and confuse output. When working with whitespace characters and line breaks, we can’t see them. This can cause a lot of confusion for users (and developers) when unexpected behavior occurs. Keep in mind we have to be careful, often we…