Collections search
During interviews, we often hear — or say ourselves — that searching in an array is slower than in a hashtable. Some might even recall that array search has linear complexity, or O(n), while a hash table has constant complexity, O(1). But does this hold true in practice? What if there are situations where searching in an array turns out to be faster? Let's not rush to conclusions.
Dapper: How caching can be harmful
Dapper is a popular library that allows mapping objects from a database to C# types. Unlike Entity Framework, it is not a full-fledged ORM, but it is very popular due to its minimalism. In this article, I will explain how the default behavior can lead to a significant increase in memory consumption.
String of Digits
A popular task is to check if a string contains only digits. For example, you need to check if the user entered the correct phone number, index or a tax code of an organization. There are several ways to solve this task, which differ in their efficiency. Let's take a look at the most popular ones.
Any() vs Count: part 2
In Part 1, we compared Any() and Count methods for different collections and proposed optimization approaches.
nvarchar(max) vs nvarchar(N)
MS SQL Server offers several data types for storing strings.
The most popular are nvarchar(N) (1 ≤ N ≤ 4000) and nvarchar(max), which allow storing Unicode-encoded string data.
Application developers often transfer their experience with the string type from programming languages like C# or Java to databases and automatically choose nvarchar(max), which can store strings up to 2GB.
However, databases store and process data in fundamentally different ways.
In this article, I will explain and demonstrate the consequences of unjustified use of the nvarchar(max) type.