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My PC is rather busy at the moment, running a regular cycle for the Coopers & Lybrand group personal pension and simultaneouly downloading part 3 of the Visual Studio service pack 3 from Microsoft. So I am reduced to using my HPC to dictate a Home News. Remember them ? Remember me ? Yes, the regular weekly Home News is coming out again, about five weeks after the last weekly Home News.

Such a lot has happened since the last Home News that the task of recording it all is rather daunting. The "Mean Green Machine" has been replaced with "BatMobile". "Red Monster" has a new water pump. The kids, amd Maggie and I have successfully learnt how to slide down a slope covered in upside down floor brushes, something we are hoping will help us slide down slopes covered with snow at least safely if not gracefully. The sax playing has started, although I am holding off cutting my first CD for a while, at least until the Spice Girls stop hogging the top slot in the charts. Hooligan, Chatterbox and Tomcat are generally behaving themslves although Chatterbox is waiting for me to install DUN 1.2, Hooligan has a problem with IIS 3 and Tomcat is permanently monopolised by Nicky playing Outlaws.

The machines have had some minor upgrades, Tomcat mainly with a Sidewinder force feedback, and some nice Yamaha speakers. We have a raft of new games, which are all rather time consuming and counter-productive. The current favourites are CC2 (Bridge too far), Age of Empires and Outlaws (a doom type clone). The Pacific General, Panzer General II, Red Alert, Total Anihalation, Worms 2 and some others are pretty much shelfware at the moment.

Books wise, we have a few more and had to do a major cleanout of the downstairs bookshelves to fit them in. Doing Objects with VB5, and Graphic Programming in Vb are two of the better ones. I am also plowing through the MS Press Inside SQL Server book.

Maggie's course at Eastleigh seems to be coming on well, and apart from anoying the lecturers by pointing out their total ignorance, seems to be having a great time. Actually that may be why she is having a great time. She named her new car, a Nissan Micra, the "Bat Mobile", to only be driven by the bat herself. It is a nice green metalic colour with alloy wheels and other comforts like electric windows and even a rain roof (it would be a sun roof, but not in Britain). By all accounts she should finish three years worth of exams in the one year and is already looking around for other courses for next year (well, September 1998). The studying bug seems to have bitten. She is also on the Systems Thinking evangalist trail at the moment after a good program on the BBC explain the Giaya theory (Daisy World and all that).

Tarryn and Nicky are still doing well at school and keeoing up their grewling music practice schedule (better than my Sax practices anyway). Tarryn got a double credit (a rare event apparantly) for a Geography project which was a decopage contour model of the United Kingdom. Nicky has restarted her Thursday night dancing classes, and they both have Guides on Tuesdays. Monday is Tarryn's orchestra practice (Violin) with a Winchester orchestra, and is practicing Andrew Loyd Webbers "Memories" ad nausium. She is also doing quite well at Hockey and seems to enjoy it best when it is rainy and muddy.

Work wise, Winterhur is keeping me busy and giving me the opportunity to pack in loads of overtime, both here and at home. The drive to Basingstoke has lost it's novelty value, and now is just a 80km slog each day avoiding the other idiots on the road. The Red Monster clocked over 200,000 km a few weeks back and is now on about 203,000 so that novelty is also wearing off. It blew it's water pump, and had to have a new one fitted. So that's the whole cooling system replaced. Surprisingly, the BMW water pump was fairly cheap at 56 UKP and the replacement came in at under a hundred after labour and paying for dirty rags and tea for the workers.

For those keep to have a giggle, get a pen and paper and draw a picture of the database design of this Winterthur Life Group Personal Pensions system. Draw five boxes and label them Product, Scheme, Category, Policy and Source. These are the five main entities and they are hierarchically organized so they have three products, each product has many schemes (Coopers for example) which have many categories (Policy Holder age based, so 30-35, 35-40 etc) which have many policies which in turn have many (normally two) contribution sources. Now access, and SQL Server and the like normally have the facility for generating unique number keys (Counters or Identities). But here they have gone for the other approach of having a system number table, to which they add one and take the number. They use this for all five entities and call the column "Entity" on each table to make this clear. Then on Scheme, they also store ProductEntity. No surprise there.

Then on each of Scheme, Category, Policy and Source they have a ParentEntity column which points to it's parent. All makes sense.

But wait there's more...

On Category they also store SchemeEntity and ProductEntity just to be sure. On Policy apart from storing DateOfBirth, they also store the CategoryEntity, Scheme Entity and ProductEntity. Of course on Source they feel the need to store all five entities. As they say on the shopping channels - but wait theres more... They also have a SchemeNo and a PolicyNo which are also generated numbers from the System Numbering Control table. Thankfully these are only stored on the Scheme and Policy tables. So that's not too bad then.

But wait theres more...

They have another table called Links. It has an UpperEntity, UpperType and LowerEntity and LowerType. Types are for some strange reason 2 for Product, 4 for Scheme, 8 for Category, 16 for Policy and 32 for Source. There is also a 64 for a variant of Scheme, a TIP but we won't complicate it now. There is also a type 0 which no one knows the reason for.

So for each source there is a link to policy, for each policy, there is a link to category, for each category there is a link to scheme, and each scheme also has a link to product.

You guessed it, theres more. Each source is also linked to category, scheme and product. Each policy is linked to scheme and product, and each category is linked to product. No there's still more. Each entity is also linked to itself (Products, Schemes, Categories, Policies and Sources).

But wait, theres more. Each entity is ALSO linked to the type zero entity (for which no one knows the purpose).

So now Joe Bloggs has his 35th birthday and needs to change Category. Or Mary leaves Coopers and needs to be transferred to the Coopers Leavers scheme. What do you think the chances are that all these links tie up and make sense ?

Great isn't it. Designed by the best of British DBA's....

In two weeks time we are headed off to Seattle to try our our new skiing prowess. The lessons on the Southampton dry slopes went well, with only a few grased knees and bruised ego's. Those on the Photo News list shold be able to enjoy a nice shot of Maggie sliding down the slope face first with the ski's pointed at impossible angles trailing behind. Thankfully I had the Camera, so there are no such shots of me.

The winter beard has made a return, although this year there are also guest performaces from a few white bristles, obviously getting into the Christmas spirit.The hair is also getting a bit Father Christmassy, not least in it's length which is now only riveled by Tarryn's. Maggie has returned to the short and curly look, and Nicky has gone for an off the collar style. I guess mine could best be described as a let it all hang out style.

Ricky

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