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Showing posts from February, 2013

One sequence per table or one sequence per database

Let us assume that you are implementing RESTful APIs for your service. Your service has the following two models: users and tweets. While inserting new entities, you should genertate IDs. The IDs for each of these models can be generated in two ways: You can use a sequence (if you are using Oracle) or autoincrement feature (if you are using MySQL) to have per model IDs. You can use a global sequence for all the models. If you are following the first strategy, you will have user IDs 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and tweet IDs 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If you are following the second strategy, you will have user IDs 1, 3, 4, 8, etc. and the tweet IDs 2, 5, 6, 7, etc.  Thinking about it, I felt that using the first strategy will leak information. Consider some one doing a tweet every day at 10:00 AM and get the tweet ID. If first day the tweet ID is 100, and the second day the tweet ID is 200, etc. That person can infer that your system is receiving 100 tweets/day. I don't know how sensitive thi

The issue with Emacs "cd" function and CDPATH

Recently I wasted sometime trying to figure out an issue with "cd" function and autocompletion in Emacs, while I had a value set for CDPATH environment variable. I hope it saves some time for someone who might bump into the same issue. I had CDPATH environment variable set and it didn't have "." (current directory) as one of the components. When I tried autocompletion while running "cd" function, it didn't show any of the subdirectories under the current directory. The directories it showed for completion were from somewhere else. As soon as I added ".", I was able to see all the subdirectories of current directory in the autocompletion list. Hope this saves some time for you as well.