It’s been a while since I last wrote something in the blog. The culprit? My MBA dissertation research study. A small advice from the newly found wisdom: If someone ever suggests you should do a nationwide survey of any kind, respectfully decline unless you live in Vatican or Monaco, or unless someone pays you to do it :). Doing it for the sake of an MBA research, even for the dissertation, is a huge pain; just choose a theoretical subject and bury yourself in books, it beats dealing with telephone interviews with paranoid members of the population, then having to trust their half-witted answers for a serious subject such as electronic retailing. Well, I did not procrastinate (my old favorite word) and I persevered (my new favorite word) and completed my research with great results, leaving me with more time to play. So, the question now is how best to celebrate the return to blogosphere? Maybe a nice one-liner LINQ to validate LUHN check? More...

If you ever did anything in SQL worth embedding into transaction(s), you were bound to encounter an age old problem of auditing failures in audit table(s) while at the same time rolling back the failed transaction. Problem ofcourse being that transaction rollbacks are efficient and blind in their duty and will leave no stone unturned while wiping out all evidence that your statements were ever executed on that server, this unfortunately including the inserts in the audit table. Kind of a catch 22 situation. Or was that the "chicken and the egg" dillema?

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