I am a snail.
Nomadic; I need no base.
I feed on coffee, power, signals.
I carry; knapsack, laptop.
On my back, my office.
I am a snail.

I've been looking at some legacy code recently, and came across something completely new to me; numbered stored procedures. It turns out that in the old days, you could create several stored procedures with the same name, and give each a different number. As you can see from the MS documentation, there is a number parameter.

These are called in the normal way:

EXEC UpdateOrder;4 20, 39
EXEC UpdateOrder;7 '12 High St.'

It's not very nice, and the "advantage" of being able to DROP them all in one go (the only feature mentioned in the documentation), isn't worth the diminished readability.

Even worse though, is that the newer SQL Server Management Studio doesn't show them in the tree view, and thus can't open them. Even trying to view the code by using INFORMATION_SCHEMA only shows the first one. I'm sure the old Enterprise Manager must be able to, but I don't want to have to install it especially.

Anyway, I thank my colleagues from throughout my career for having kept me from needing to know about this until now. I don't know who introduced this nonsense into this project (or indeed, SQL Server), and I hope it remains thus.

Today I've been co-working at the brand new Lewes Werks. Co-working means to work in an office with people who are not your colleagues, which is ideal for self-employed people or homeworkers.

It's being run by the same people who run the Brighton Werks, so the philosophy is the same; to provide a shared workspace for creative workers, with an emphasis on the social side of work. There are also two separate rooms that would suit small companies of 4-6 people.

I can turn up with my laptop, and have a break from working from home (which contains builders and children at various times). Once it becomes more established, there will be plenty of people to get to know, share ideas and possible projects, and have a bit of techie chat and office banter, which I do miss.



The full price list is on the Werks website, but for February only, all co-working is FREE!

There are a few parking spaces, a sandwich shop a few doors away, and a bus stop too, so I'll definitely be going back.