Are the posted questions getting worse?
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SQLRNNR (3/28/2014)
Would you call yourselves programmers or developers?
I have often heard that programmers are more like code monkeys and developers have higher skills.
semantics. They're both the same thing. Most of the that built the underpinnings of everything we use today, the protocols, transports, etc., were programmers. Someone decided they could get paid more with a new title and came up with developer.
I tell people I'm a computer programmer. Easiest explanation I can give.
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GilaMonster (3/28/2014)
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
Grant - You have booth babes??? :w00t:Grant *is* the booth 'babe' 🙂
What am I?
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Jeff Moden (3/28/2014)
GilaMonster (3/28/2014)
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
Grant - You have booth babes??? :w00t:Grant *is* the booth 'babe' 🙂
Heh... especially on kilt day. 😀
You have six months, Santa
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Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/28/2014)
GilaMonster (3/28/2014)
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
Grant - You have booth babes??? :w00t:Grant *is* the booth 'babe' 🙂
What am I?
We're still working on that.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore RooseveltAuthor of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning -
I call myself a Database Developer, but I've used programmer in the past. MY current title is Data Software Development Lead. If you can figure out what that is, let me know:-P
So at my new job, I'm working on my first project so I want to see what the web app (Java) is doing on single screen, so I can duplicate the code and stay off the web page. I'm working in a development environment that isn't being used by anyone but me. So i figure it'll be easy to use Profiler to get the *completed events to see the SQL being submitted. All I'm getting is RPC:Completed, SP:Completed, and Batch:Completed events filtered by database and in the 1st 5 seconds like 3000 events come across just from the background jobs for this app. Have I mentioned the app was designed to be run against Oracle and is a Java app?
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
Check out these links on how to get faster and more accurate answers:
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Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/28/2014)
Jeff Moden (3/28/2014)
GilaMonster (3/28/2014)
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
Grant - You have booth babes??? :w00t:Grant *is* the booth 'babe' 🙂
Heh... especially on kilt day. 😀
You have six months, Santa
erm Oh Boy
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Learn Extended Events -
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.Based on what I have to deal daily answer is easily :-):-(
This kind of things happen when programmers write t-SQL.
In my experience most DBAs who aren't programmers couldn't write SQL to save their lives and think cursors are the epitome of set-oriented programming. Generally programmers who have experience in more than one programing paradigm, or indeed in any reasonably well designed programming language (and of course DBAs with experience of writing in languages like lisp or ML or Haskell) do far better than non-programming DBAs. It's clear that when programmers who have experience only in some badly designed language like C++ or VB will make a complete wreck of anything they try to do in SQL unless they have some decent Sql training, but tarring all programmers with that brush is narrow-minded prejudice, as is assuming that all bad SQL is written by programmers and not by the DBAs.
Tom
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Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/28/2014)
SQLRNNR (3/28/2014)
Would you call yourselves programmers or developers?
I have often heard that programmers are more like code monkeys and developers have higher skills.
semantics. They're both the same thing. Most of the that built the underpinnings of everything we use today, the protocols, transports, etc., were programmers. Someone decided they could get paid more with a new title and came up with developer.
After developers came yet another new title: Software Engineer; and many more, for example Information Technology Practitioner, Software Architect, System Designer, Systems Architect, Software Designer and so on. They were all attempts to distinguish between the highly productive minority and the less productive majority, but all the titles got thoroughly debased as a side effect of teh recruitment process so that today a "Senior Software Architect" is simply someone with 7 years experience of writing bug-ridden ill-performing C++ (or perhaps that is now C# instead of C++).
Most of the people who came built the underpinnings of what we have today were computer scientists (like Codd, Wilkes,
Turing, Bacchus, Berners-Lee, Cerf, Postel, Kirstein, Brown, Cardelli, Tukey, Cooley, O-J Dahl, Hoare, - I guess I don't need to go on, but I'm sure I could list a lot if I wanted to waste everyone's time with a long list), most of whom started out as mathematicians or electrical engineers or classicists or soldiers or almost anything but computer scientists or programmers. Of course some of them were good at programming, but some were instead good hardware designers, or good at designing error detection and recovery or comms protocols or encryption or computer languages so it's not true to say most who built the underpinnings were programmers.
I tell people I'm a computer programmer. Easiest explanation I can give.
I usually tended to tell people that I played with computers. Sometimes I said that I was a computer scientist, which of course is pretty much the same thing. Computer programmer would be almost as accurate in my case, but for those not in the game it is just as incomprehensible or meaningless of either of the others, and at least the "play" version made it clear that I didn't think trying to explain what I did to a layman would be useful and the "scientist" version told them they wouldn't understand an explanation anyway, while people would think they could understand a description of what a "programmer" did (and waste my time demanding an explanation they wouldn't understand). Of course now the best description for me would be "dabbler".
Tom
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Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
WayneS (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.I believe it's due to developers that know how to write basic select, insert, update, delete statements, and for everything else, it's a cursor. Because all that they know is procedural (iterative) processing, and they won't learn the set-based way of doing it.
Believe it or not, I've seen this approach taken to another level before. Have the web page select a bunch of rows from the database. Then, on the web server, initialize a variable to zero so you can cursor through the rows and add up the total. Finally, you have a number to display on the screen. All the bytes returned from the database, the iteration on the web server, and the delay the users experienced were eliminated by using a simple SUM. Of course, the question of how it could be right came up because there wasn't enough code. Sigh.
This reminds me of being questioned about the accuracy of a report that I had just sped up from > 1/2 hour to mere seconds. "It's too fast to be right".
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:
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Performance Problems
Common date/time routines
Understanding and Using APPLY Part 1 & Part 2 -
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
WayneS (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.I believe it's due to developers that know how to write basic select, insert, update, delete statements, and for everything else, it's a cursor. Because all that they know is procedural (iterative) processing, and they won't learn the set-based way of doing it.
Believe it or not, I've seen this approach taken to another level before. Have the web page select a bunch of rows from the database. Then, on the web server, initialize a variable to zero so you can cursor through the rows and add up the total. Finally, you have a number to display on the screen. All the bytes returned from the database, the iteration on the web server, and the delay the users experienced were eliminated by using a simple SUM. Of course, the question of how it could be right came up because there wasn't enough code. Sigh.
Oh, that's not too bad. I've seen a case where whole dataset was passed by the web server to the client, and the sum obtained by executing client-side JavaScript (that was itself downloaded from the server, of course).
I once heard a story about a case where the website designer didn't know about WHERE clauses so the whole cross product of all the tables involved in the select was pulled into serverside VBS and filtered there bfore being fed to the client for it to get a max min, and mean, and the client used a bubble sort (coded in VBS) to get the max and min and then took another pass looping over the data to compute the mean, but I never saw it and suspect that it was just an urban legend circulating amongst haters of VBS programmers.
Tom
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TomThomson (3/28/2014)
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.Based on what I have to deal daily answer is easily :-):-(
This kind of things happen when programmers write t-SQL.
It's clear that when programmers who have experience only in some badly designed language like C++ or VB will make a complete wreck of anything they try to do in SQL unless they have some decent Sql training, but tarring all programmers with that brush is narrow-minded prejudice, as is assuming that all bad SQL is written by programmers and not by the DBAs.
Oh Tom you must be judging me then 🙂
Most of my programming experience is from c++ and PHP and I have newer attended any SQL training.
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WayneS (3/28/2014)
Ed Wagner (3/28/2014)
WayneS (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.I believe it's due to developers that know how to write basic select, insert, update, delete statements, and for everything else, it's a cursor. Because all that they know is procedural (iterative) processing, and they won't learn the set-based way of doing it.
Believe it or not, I've seen this approach taken to another level before. Have the web page select a bunch of rows from the database. Then, on the web server, initialize a variable to zero so you can cursor through the rows and add up the total. Finally, you have a number to display on the screen. All the bytes returned from the database, the iteration on the web server, and the delay the users experienced were eliminated by using a simple SUM. Of course, the question of how it could be right came up because there wasn't enough code. Sigh.
This reminds me of being questioned about the accuracy of a report that I had just sped up from > 1/2 hour to mere seconds. "It's too fast to be right".
I was asked to look at a month end process that was running a little long, about 35 hours. Since the system could not be used while this process was running, the users were a bit irritated.
I looked at it and realized that it had about 5 levels of nested cursors. I re-wrote it as a set based stored procedure, and it ran in about 20 seconds.
The first day that it ran, they called me to say it must have had an error, because it ran too fast.
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Jack Corbett (3/28/2014)
I call myself a Database Developer, but I've used programmer in the past. MY current title is Data Software Development Lead. If you can figure out what that is, let me know:-PI generally list my role as 'database specialist'. i.e. I do databases and little else and I can do just about anything with SQL Server to one degree of competence or another, admin, development, programming, design, etc (except BI. Still can't spell that)
My official title is 'Technical Lead', whatever that means, I do very little leading of any form.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverabilityWe walk in the dark places no others will enter
We stand on the bridge and no one may pass -
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/28/2014)
TomThomson (3/28/2014)
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.Based on what I have to deal daily answer is easily :-):-(
This kind of things happen when programmers write t-SQL.
It's clear that when programmers who have experience only in some badly designed language like C++ or VB will make a complete wreck of anything they try to do in SQL unless they have some decent Sql training, but tarring all programmers with that brush is narrow-minded prejudice, as is assuming that all bad SQL is written by programmers and not by the DBAs.
Oh Tom you must be judging me then 🙂
Most of my programming experience is from c++ and PHP and I have newer attended any SQL training.
I see that I managed to lose some words - I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to work out what should have come between "VB" and "will".
As to judging people, I prefered not to judge except by experience of the person being judged; of course when recruiting I had to judge by resumés and interviews, but I no longer have to do that.
Tom
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TomThomson (3/28/2014)
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/28/2014)
TomThomson (3/28/2014)
Ville-Pekka Vahteala (3/27/2014)
Luis Cazares (3/27/2014)
How is it possible that someone writes a cursor instead of using SUM()?I'm afraid that this database is full of these pieces of
shcode and it's slower than a snail going backwards.Based on what I have to deal daily answer is easily :-):-(
This kind of things happen when programmers write t-SQL.
It's clear that when programmers who have experience only in some badly designed language like C++ or VB will make a complete wreck of anything they try to do in SQL unless they have some decent Sql training, but tarring all programmers with that brush is narrow-minded prejudice, as is assuming that all bad SQL is written by programmers and not by the DBAs.
Oh Tom you must be judging me then 🙂
Most of my programming experience is from c++ and PHP and I have newer attended any SQL training.
I see that I managed to lose some words - I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to work out what should have come between "VB" and "will".
As to judging people, I prefered not to judge except by experience of the person being judged; of course when recruiting I had to judge by resumés and interviews, but I no longer have to do that.
If I may note, there is a dearth of developers who are able to work in both a (mostly) procedural language and at the same time in SQL, in both above the average.
In, say, C# you have to think 'What will I accomplish in this line of code and what will I do in the next one?'; in SQL it is 'What I can do to this column/these columns to get it done in one step?'.
If you can do it, you might be classified as MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder). Unfortunately, I am not kidding on this one - the pharmaceutical complex is always looking for new customers and psychiatrists are, at least in NA, willing if not enthusiastic accomplices.
However, I am always lookin'. 😉
Have a great weekend.
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