New contract

I started a new contract last month. I'm working for a financial consulting firm in the heart of downtown Chicago. These folks are doing a ton of Perl DBI development, using SyBase as the database of choice on Linux. They are transitioning from Solaris, which I have a lot more experience on than Linux. These folks have been doing the Perl/DBI thing for quite a while, and so have I. It's great to exchange some ideas and code with the other developers. I'm certainly learning a few things and passing along what I know as we go.

I'm still trying to get everything nailed down as far as which databases are accessed for which purposes, the various download, extract and load templates available, etc., but there is a definite ramping up in the complexity of task assignments. With the transition from Solaris to Linux is a chance to rewrite a lot of older programs and move to some newer design ideas. Some of the things are replacing repeated select/insert/do statements with their prepare and execute counterparts using placeholders. One of the changes last week ended up helping the task to run 6x faster.

I'll get into the details on that at a later time. Suffice it to say, if you're hitting the limits of your hardware performance, this is an easy area to regain some time.