So I am now the main person responsible for LMS development for Star Horizon. And yeah, i’m under their cheque-book now 🙂

After modifying a couple of Datagrids so that they are sortable and page-able, I’m now stuck with the number of multiple connections connected to the MySQL server.

Our System consists of MyODBC, .NET Framework 1.1, IIS. 6 and MySQL Database server.

Today i run some dummy test, basically i used two computers to login to LMS using different username. I was playing around with the datagrids to see their effect to MyODBC. I was continually clicking the sorting button and changing the page number of the datagrids.

Maybe after only 5 iterations with 2 users, i generated almost 100 connections between MyODBC to MySQL. (Check the screenshot)

At the moment i dont have any clear picture what will happen if let say, 1000 users login at the same time. I dare to say its gonna be a darn gloomy day… hehe..

So what i can do now is just increasing the number of concurrent connection allowed to the MySQL server.

So i increased the number of connections from 800 to 20000.

Hmm.. let me get some volunteers or tools to test it.

Let say you want to create a on-the-fly table which fetch the list of users with certain properties. The problem with the users is that, some of them is without any properties. Instead of displaying blank, you want to display ‘—-‘. Since you want to do this on the fly, not by modifying the table. These infos will come handy.

Simply using UNION will help you to achieve above problem. Meta-SQL :

Select User,Properties 
From Users where Properties <> Null 
Union 
Select User, '----' as Properties 
From users 
where User not in 
(Select User from Users where Properties <> Null)

In IIS, this will throw you Collation error if you Users table is encoded in UTF8, the Properties value of ‘—-‘ will be encoded in Latin. Thus, it will throws you collation error.

In order to convert the ‘—-‘ encoded as UTF8, you must use _utf8 as prefix of your string. Eq: _utf8′—-‘ instead of only ‘—-‘

Communicating with higher management always require tactics and tricks. Today, after making my own mistake, my manager-Ms. Judy reminded me a very good principle. Which is ..

‘Less is more’

Reporting to higher management doesn’t require us to explain all the details, we must be able to tailor the content of our report so it won’t go too much into details. Always only provide summary of the information unless they explicitely require you to go into details.

Another positive thing for giving less information is that you will cover yourself from unnecessary questioning. Sometime the details are too distracting, our boss will forget the general picture of the problem. Thus, he/she will only comments about the details without ever address the main issue.

But this doesn’t mean we dont prepare the details, we do prepare them, but only will shown them if its required.

Thanks Ms. Judy Koh =)