Tesmond's Useful Design

Well made a new interesting discovery today. Combining TOP with ORDER BY can severely slow down a query. I was looking into a slow query which was taking around 10 seconds to return 69 results. It was getting the "TOP 100" from a specific date range and then ordering by ID descending. It was fascinating to me to discover that removing the TOP 100 returned the results in 0.005 seconds. Removing the ORDER BY instead of the TOP 100 also resulted in again producing the results in 0.005 seconds. So the moral of the story is don't use TOP and ORDER BY if you want your results back quickly. I have no idea why this kills performance right now, but it is perhaps even more interesting that even though the query TOP 100 ORDER BY ID ASC results in the same set of results as TOP 100 without an ORDER BY command, it takes 8.8 seconds rather than 0.005 seconds. There are definitely some huge optimisations available in respect to these queries. Update Well after reporting this t

Photographer :  Cindy J Grady I have been lucky enough to experienced using keyboards on iOS, Android and Windows Phone (8 and 8.1) which has really shown me how important a good input method is in the mobile experience. Each keyboard has unique features which makes choosing the best keyboard a bit of a struggle. Until recently I had completely dismissed iOS keyboard for the following reasons 1. 4" display means that the keys are harder to press accurately 2. Selecting & deleting words is trickier than both Android and Windows Phone not just due to the smaller target area, but also the implementation requires a "long press" to activate the magnifying glass to achieve accurate cursor location. 3. Lack of swype / shape writing style input. While options 1 and 2 were of just minor inconvenience option 3 is a major issue. Swyping / Shape writing There are three great features of shape writing 1. It is a much faster input method on the whole than key p