Articles by David Bolton

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  Database Types from Hierarchical to Graph: An Industry Breakdown

  In 1962, the first database, Integrated Data Store (IDS), made its debut. It was a hierarchical type, the only kind available at that time. It wasn't until the early 1970s that relational databas…
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  5 Open-Source SQL IDEs for You to Learn and Explore

  If you’ve done a lot with SQL, you've probably used some form of SQL IDE to help you complete that work. Yes, it's possible to do everything in SQL from the command line; but creating or even mai…
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  Breaking Down the State of C Programming

  Who could have imagined that, nearly 50 years after its creation, the programming language C would not only be going strong, but still rank highly on various programming-language indexes such as…
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  5 First Programming Languages You Should Learn

  So you want to learn programming, but aren't sure which programming language you should learn first? In this article, I'll try and help you pick a language. There are certainly plenty to choose f…
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  SAFE Network: Can Cryptocurrency Power a Secure Network?

  In the beginning, there was the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPANET), a packet-switching network started in 1969. ARPANET is notable as the first network to implement TCP/IP, which…
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  5 Ways to Catch and Handle Errors in Desktop and Web Apps

  It’s a sad fact of life that, no matter how skilled the programmers writing it, all code has errors (at least initially). There are lots of reasons for this: misunderstanding the project specs, f…
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  Programmers, Get Familiar with 'Pythonic' Python

  Now in its 26th year (and still going strong in terms of popularity), Python stands out for its distinctive syntax compared to those programming languages based on C. Programmers appreciate how P…
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  4 Problems with Processor Thread Programming

  Threads are a useful way to get more out of your CPU. Technically known as a “thread of execution,” a thread is the smallest possible sequence of programmed instructions handled by a scheduler. M…
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  Managing SQL Server in Code: A Brief Walkthrough

  Microsoft's flagship relational database, SQL Server, is now 28 years old and still going strong. It comes with a decent set of management tools, ranging from SQL Management Studio to SQLCMD, a c…
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  A Quick Guide to Denormalizing Databases

  A relational database stores data in multiple tables. Each table has columns describing the type of information, and each row is an instance of that data. Codd's 12 Rules apply to relational data…