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Please use ANSI-92 SQL Join Syntax

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Way back in 1992, a standard was published for SQL. In it, the syntax for specifying joins in SQL Database was finally standardized. This was a good thing because (for folks who've been doing this a while), trying to decode the vagaries of how various Databases handled outer joins could drive you bonkers yielding different results depending on the parse order of things in the from and where clauses. Unfortunately, some DBMS vendors took a while to adopt this standard (Oracle didn't support it until 2001), but at this point if you're using a major RDBMS and NOT using it, you're probably mired in a tradition or habit that bears changing. As an example of what I'm describing, here are some examples of what I mean. Old School (no standard syntax + implementation and evaluation of predicates varied by vendor [and query]): select * from customer, order where customer.customer = order.customerid ANSI way (agreed to standard, predicate evaluation has some rules ...
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the myth of asynchronous JDBC

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I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries. STOP IT! Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders. While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous. At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response. It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters. Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block. It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet. Yes, I know ajdbc is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default). Someday we'll have async databa...
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webxr with Babylonjs, A-frame/Threejs, and Unity

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I've been working quite extensively on a webxr side project. Originally it was built with a-frame / threejs. You can take a look at it here at Immersive Idea . Recently I relized I was "fighting the framework" more than I was "getting things done". Originally, I chose a-frame because it was essentially a "no code" (well just html markup) way to build scenes. Additionally it's ECS framework was very well documented and easy to use. In an effort to broaden my perspective I started looking at alternatives (Unity with OpenXr, Babylonjs) as I was struggling to keep the pieces working together. This is my (slightly long) recap of my observations. A-Frame A-frame is wonderful...it is well documented, easy to use, and the community is super friendly and helpful. If I simplly wanted to render scenes in webxr with minimal ability to manipulate the environment, I wouldn't even think twice about using it.... Heck I still use it for quick m...
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