Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Kit G SSCrazy Points: 2888 More actions · Answer 1

I think Simple Talk uses LuLu.

Cool. A good recommendation. I'll check it out. My research so far has lead me to the conclusion of "Let the buyer beware" which is true of everything.

Found an amusing tale of some SF writers submitting a book to one of the vanity publishers that claimed to be more of a "traditional" publisher with a staff that would read your book to determine if it was of high enough quality to print. To check it out, a bunch of them wrote a really bad book, each writing a chapter, using only a thin outline of that chapter and characters, not knowing where in the story the chapter was and writing it badly. One chapter was even mechanically generated.

They succeeded. It is the worst book published. I can agree with that after reading a few chapters. It's worse than what I wrote in high school (and that, upon review years later, was bad). The book is Atlanta Heights (and available on LuLu after the original publisher backed out of an offer to publish it) if you're curious, but be warned, it really is bad writing, but also amusing in that morbid fascinating way. The original manuscript that got approved for publication is here. Article revealing the sting is here[/url].

You could probably use it as a writer's tool of "Don't do this in your own book, kid."

-- Kit

The Dixie Flatline SSC Guru Points: 53354 More actions · Answer 2

It was a dark and stormy night....

__________________________________________________

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Friedrich Schiller
Stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. -- Stephen Stills

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004363 More actions · Answer 3

Paul White NZ (7/16/2010)
Jeff Moden (7/16/2010)
...using IDENTITY in combination with some table and index hints, have been able to resolve the ones I haven't be able to avoid (guaranteed multi-row inserts over a contiguous range of numbers with absolutely no gaps).
TABLOCKX?

That, MAXDOP, and the occasional Temp Table for preprocessing. 😉

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Kit G SSCrazy Points: 2888 More actions · Answer 4

The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
It was a dark and stormy night....

As I sat down to write...

-- Kit

george sibbald SSC Guru Points: 104210 More actions · Answer 5

@Gail

Plus, since the kitchen faces South-West, it gets very little sun except late in the afternoon. The bedroom, with wall-to-wall windows facing NE is a fair bit warmer, so's the study.

As someone in the northern hemisphere that sounds seriously weird. to get the sun we face south. If I bought a house down there on spec I could make a serious misjudgment.

By the way which way does the water revolve as it goes down the plughole down there?

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736270 More actions · Answer 6

Kit G (7/16/2010)
The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
It was a dark and stormy night....
As I sat down to write...

I was quite a sight...

Gail Shaw SSC Guru Points: 1004504 More actions · Answer 7

george sibbald (7/16/2010)
As someone in the northern hemisphere that sounds seriously weird. to get the sun we face south. If I bought a house down there on spec I could make a serious misjudgment.

I'd have the same problem shopping up there. You'd almost never have a bedroom or lounge south-facing here. Would just be too dark.

By the way which way does the water revolve as it goes down the plughole down there?

Depends on disturbances in the water before pulling the plug. It's a myth that it always goes the same way. Not enough influence from the earth's rotation, too small an amount of water.

Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

We walk in the dark places no others will enter
We stand on the bridge and no one may pass

TomThomson SSC Guru Points: 104773 More actions · Answer 8

Paul White NZ (7/16/2010)
By a 'mess', I mean pretty much what I said on the thread: there are four possible results from an error condition, and there doesn't seem to be any logic to which error does what. The dependency on obscure settings like ARITHABORT, NUMERIC_ROUNDABORT, ANSI_WARNINGS, and ARITHIGNORE is just the icing on the cake.
It's easy to find examples of error conditions that merely abandon the current statement, and continue executing the batch, while conceptually less serious errors abort the whole batch. Dumbness abounds.
Don't get me wrong: I think the guy's a dick, and I don't agree with his main points, but he does have a right to whine about the problems he perceives. It's just the manner that bugs me.

I pretty much agree with all that, and I wouldn't mind if he moaned about the genuine problems. But a claim that any form of try-catch construct that alters the behaviour under some error conditions of code executed in the context of the try block is bad design is just ignorant drivel, as is also the claim that C# and other VB don't have exacly that property too. the imaginary "outer try block" in C++ and C# rather gets me too, apparently he is incapable of distinguishing operating system action from appplication action. So in my case it's at least as much the content as the manner that bugs me. And when he calls each of Grant, Dave and GianLuca stupid or a dead loss or similar, that's not only grossly inaccurate but annoying. And as for his claims of inconsistency and/or inaccuracy and/or ambiguity in the BoL material on try-catch, well... I'm no great believer in the infallibility of BoL (in fact in contains a whole slew or errors), but I and many others who have bothered to read the relevant sections have had no problem at all in knowing what it says it will do and have discovered that SQL Server does exactly that, so it seems to be consistent. accurate, and unambiguous on the subject or try-catch.

The thing I dislike about in T-SQL's error handling isn't the lack of a finally feature (although that could be a pain), nor is it having to mess around with magic settings, which is just a part of life (many procedural or OO languages have an exact equivalent or ARITHIGNORE) nor yet is it fact that some errors are uncatchable is a pain, but inevitable - for example you won't catch a hardware failure that forces an immediate OS shutdown in any language. It's being unable to filter the errors that are caught so as not to have to rethrow them if they are ones I don't want to deal with here.

Tom

The Dixie Flatline SSC Guru Points: 53354 More actions · Answer 9

Steve Jones - Editor (7/16/2010)
Kit G (7/16/2010)
The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
It was a dark and stormy night....
As I sat down to write...
I was quite a sight...

We could start a rhyme of the day, like the random word of the day.

I'll get it started off.....

"Orange"

__________________________________________________

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Friedrich Schiller
Stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. -- Stephen Stills

WayneS SSC Guru Points: 95460 More actions · Answer 10

The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
We could start a rhyme of the day, like the random word of the day.
I'll get it started off.....
"Orange"

Someone's being a smart-a**

Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes

If you can't explain to another person how the code that you're copying from the internet works, then DON'T USE IT on a production system! After all, you will be the one supporting it!

Links:
For better assistance in answering your questions
Performance Problems
Common date/time routines
Understanding and Using APPLY Part 1 & Part 2

Paul White SSC Guru Points: 150467 More actions · Answer 11

The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
We could start a rhyme of the day, like the random word of the day.
I'll get it started off.....
"Orange"

Lozenge! 😀

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/103

Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi

Paul White SSC Guru Points: 150467 More actions · Answer 12

Tom.Thomson (7/16/2010)
...But a claim that any form of try-catch construct that alters the behaviour under some error conditions of code executed in the context of the try block is bad design is just ignorant drivel, as is also the claim that C# and other VB don't have exacly that property too.

Yep. The original 'point' he made was pretty weak, and it kinda went downhill from there.

At least it seems to have stopped now - perhaps Steve's email did the trick after all?

Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi

J Livingston SQL SSC Guru Points: 51550 More actions · Answer 13

Door Hinge.....;-)

________________________________________________________________
you can lead a user to data....but you cannot make them think
and remember....every day is a school day

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736270 More actions · Answer 14

Paul White NZ (7/16/2010)
Tom.Thomson (7/16/2010)
...But a claim that any form of try-catch construct that alters the behaviour under some error conditions of code executed in the context of the try block is bad design is just ignorant drivel, as is also the claim that C# and other VB don't have exacly that property too.
Yep. The original 'point' he made was pretty weak, and it kinda went downhill from there.
At least it seems to have stopped now - perhaps Steve's email did the trick after all?

I did get an email back from the author. He/she said that they just ran out of patience that people weren't understanding his point and posted out of frustration. There was an apology, so I think it is dropped.

David Burrows SSC Guru Points: 65142 More actions · Answer 15

Steve Jones - Editor (7/16/2010)
Kit G (7/16/2010)
The Dixie Flatline (7/16/2010)
It was a dark and stormy night....
As I sat down to write...
I was quite a sight...

That you're all wrong and I am right

😉

Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
Anon.