Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

I was doing some Access 2007 debugging for a client today and a search using a form was taking close to 10 minutes. Even with a half million records, this seemed horribly slow for Access. Changing the query from (year = 2007 or year = 2008 or year = 2009) to (year < 2006) made the 10 minute search turn into a 2 second search. Apparently testing for equality with Access is terribly expensive in terms of process time.

All is back to normal now, but on my first boot up after installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the screen of my Mac Book Pro was black. For some reason, the upgrade set my screen brightness all the way to zero and then the screen brightness keys (F1 and F2) would not respond for about 5 minutes after boot up. This seems to be a completely different quirk than a similar one I’ve seen with minor updates to 10.5. In that case, a black screen could generally be solved by powering down the Mac Book Pro and removing the battery for a few minutes–then booting back up.