Keep application performance design in first place.

Most often when we write a piece of software we often lack of consideration thanking about designing a fast loading program and this is always true if we designed a small program. Actually there are various of ways to improve the performance of program, for example keep the program initialization as light weight as possible, be careful when we allocate memory, and always think of threaded programming design. Sometimes, we feel demotivated because of the expensive cost involve in having putting performance design in the first place, however, investment will be well worth if the customer don't feel your software is slow and underperformed in average.

Assume that we design a small program called Sales Reporting to be used in an organization. Since the program has just only a few modules, we ignore the performance design. Over the time, we might be adding some functionality, hence the complexity of the program increase. Maintainability of the program also an issue if the program is not well designed. One day, you are requested to improve the performance of the program because users are keep complaining that the slow loading program keep them not be patient anymore. Users are fed up and their work is always distracted. The company are not going to invest to redesigned the program because over the year many time and money was spent in maintaining the program. The program is reliable and the problem is just lack of performance. You as a software consultant is hired to perform this task, what is the first thing you would do?

You might be run test the program at the first place to see which area need to be improved. You had identify that some areas need to be redesigned for significant performance gain. You had just planned the initial strategy. Secondly, you are looking to the source code, you are over surprise that most part of the code could be very difficult to be modify for performance gain because the original designer do not keep the best practise in coding hence lead to performance issue. Another concern is that the application is extremely tedious to convert to threaded application because initially the program is very difficult to maintain and the structure the application is not well understood by anyone.

You see, the scenario above has demonstrated that application tend to be extremely difficult to gain performance when the application aged. To solve this problem we must keep performance design in the first place during application planning and design phase.

Format default date in SQL Server 2005

Normally the default date for sql server is shown as 1/1/2007 12:00:00, however i feel the format of the date is too long and it would be better to be formatted as 1 Jan 2007. In order to create this effect, here the tip.

CONVERT(CHAR(11), getdate(), 106) AS Date