Tim Hoolihan

Category: Data

  • Running a Local ElasticSearch Cluster for Development

    ElasticSearch is a document database built on Lucene, a full text-search engine. It clusters and is useful in a variety of scenarios. If you want to run it locally and test some of the clustering feature, here are some things I learned from my experience. Install with your preferred package manager, or from source. In […]

  • Working With Social Network APIs

    Creating Vicinity Buzz naturally involved working with a the APIs of social networks. That information seemed worth sharing for those of you interested in writing any type of application that would integrate with a social network. Developer Documentation Any of the social networking sites you probably want to integrate with have developer api’s that are […]

  • Dealing With An ORA-01440 When Altering a Table in Oracle

    When altering a table to an Oracle reduce a columns size, you’ll get a ORA-01440 error, indicating that you can’t make the adjustment because of the potential data loss. I had to do this to recently to a bunch of columns, as I had incorrectly specified the size of numbers that would end up as […]

  • On Terminology: “Single Source of the Truth”

    According to Wikipedia, Single Source of the Truth “refers to the practice of structuring information models and associated schemata, such that every data element is stored exactly once” (emphasis is mine). This would mean, for example, a customer’s first name to be stored in once repository, not in every system that refers to the customer. […]

  • On Commuting and The Economy

    Yesterday, I left downtown Cleveland at 3:45 headed to a 4 o’clock meeting. I was probably going to be 5-10 minutes late. Instead I ended up calling to reschedule, and still didn’t make it home till 6:15. Two and half hours, for a drive that usually takes me 45-55 minutes. Google maps says 38 minutes, […]