h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Heard you've got a job (well it was in your title ), I hope its going well.

If you don't mind me asking, what field is it in?

I should (hopefully), get my degree next year, and at the moment I'm looking at Graduate Opportunities with companies. I mean given your a year ahead of me is there anywhere you'd recommend looking at?

I actually start the job tomorrow, so I'll let you know then how it's going.

As for graduate opportunities... well, I was lucky and found an agency who were very helpful. I wouldn't rely on them though. Talk to your University's careers people, find the jobs fairs, the companies with the graduate programmes and so forth - I missed all that because I was too late (dallying about doing a PhD or joining the police mostly, then when both those doors were closed it was too late).

The trick is getting in early and a bit of luck.

Well I hope the job turns out to alright

Thanks for the advice

I was actually looking the other day at the Barclay's bank site and I don't think they even consider people until October, so I'm not sure how worried I need to be at the moment. Though obviously its something I'm thinking a lot about at the moment

Woohoo! First day at work - job good :D Got lots of Perl programming to do tomorrow.

Perl, eh?

What kind of database are you using?

MySQL, but why did you think that we were using a database with Perl? There are plenty of things we do with Perl that have nothing at all to do with databases. One hideously complex Perl script I've been looking at pulls one query out of the database, then proceeds to perform some rather frightening operations on a very, very large directory tree located on a SCSI RAID array. Really we're just using the database for a bit of data storage for stuff that's too big to put into flat files.

I've never really used a database for things like that before, and it's quite a liberating experience, but we could do it almost as easily the other way (although it would run slower, and this thing needs to run FAST).

I guess I just naturally ussumed that you would be using the language for a database. I almost put "What kind of database are you using, if any at all?".

I remember the first time I saw a perl script. Previously I had only really seen C and Quick BASIC, and I realised I still had a lot to learn about programming, and computers on the whole. There are still a lot of strange commands I don't know how to use in Perl.

Flat Files in business? I always got the impression from my teachers/lecturers that they where discouraged, a bit like goto statements

We used MySQL, but we had an earlier version of it which was a little limiting to how we set the relationships up between the entities in our group coursework.

Flat files can sometimes be the most practical way to do things, but only for very small amounts of data, otherwise the indexing and searching and other operations become prohibitively slow very quickly. However, there are other things you wouldn't want to use a database for, so you have to balance things out.

My company's primary product at the moment maintains a rather horribly complicated cache of files (and bits of files) which is at the moment anything up to 400GB in size. Just try indexing that quickly...