Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Brandie Tarvin SSC Guru Points: 173068 More actions · Answer 1

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>

Hey, just because I'm getting an MBA doesn't mean I know how to read. That there's college type learnin'!

Brandie Tarvin, MCITP Database AdministratorLiveJournal Blog: http://brandietarvin.livejournal.com/[/url]On LinkedIn!, Google+, and Twitter.Freelance Writer: ShadowrunLatchkeys: Nevermore, Latchkeys: The Bootleg War, and Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night are now available on Nook and Kindle.

ManicStar SSCoach Points: 17992 More actions · Answer 2

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>

Yep, like "General Network Error, check your network documentation."

jasona.work SSC Guru Points: 50117 More actions · Answer 3

Oh so tempting to reply to Steve's posts over in the test forum with a "This didn't work for me, what is wrong with it?"
😀

Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 4

Code Monkey, the SQL - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 1:30 PM
Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>
Yep, like "General Network Error, check your network documentation."

And then can't even trouble shoot the problem correctly. Let's compare the data in the table that is the target of the failing insert instead of the data in the table he is using to insert the data.

drew.allen SSC Guru Points: 76985 More actions · Answer 5

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>

If it's the topic I think it is, it appears that he did read the error message, but didn't understand it. He also didn't understand either of our replies.

Drew

J. Drew Allen
Business Intelligence Analyst
Philadelphia, PA

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736255 More actions · Answer 6

jasona.work - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 1:52 PM
Oh so tempting to reply to Steve's posts over in the test forum with a "This didn't work for me, what is wrong with it?"
😀

PEBKAC

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 7

jasona.work - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 10:50 AM
Brandie Tarvin - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 10:38 AM
Greg Edwards-268690 - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 9:22 AM
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 8:26 AM
I hope they release a root cause, as it would be good to know. However, this could, and has happened, with many individual companies.
The issue here isn't so much that a single AWS data center had problems, which is what this appears to be, but that companies didn't expect any outage and didn't plan for any failover. They assumed S3 would always work in their data center. Just like companies that assume their single co-lo or in house data center will always be live can have issues.
Assumed is the key word. Likely they expected a Data Center would be back online in a couple minutes, not a matter of hours.
DR is always an interesting topic. Cost, risk, and whether reduced level of service are acceptable all come into play.
Kind of an eye opener to see the ripple effect of how many different things can be impacted by an outage when redundancy is assumed.
What a connected world we depend on.
When you say "they" are you referring to Amazon or their customers?
It just shocks me that Amazon's little red icon files for the warning part of the dashboard was housed in only one data center. Like the files (tiny as they had to be) couldn't be stored redundantly elsewhere because ... they didn't have money for the extra storage space?
The Amazon dashboard couldn't tell people that the system was down because the "things have failed" stuff was stored in the data center that went down. That's not just bad DR, it's horrible PR.
I'd bet it could apply equally to both.
The customers were operating on the "It's Amazon, they never go down, and if they do I'm sure they've got plans in place to minimize the downtime and after all, they promise multiple 9s' of uptime" while Amazon was likely figuring they were on the ball with lots of redundancy across all the systems within a datacenter.
But, regardless of how well you redundancize your systems, there's ALWAYS going to be something that can kill the whole thing in one go.

I'm thinking Adama on Battlestar Galactica and the reason why it was one of the few survivors. 😉

As for the rest of it, you can blame the users all you want... I blame the bloody hype and advertising and other "too cool for school" recommendations about the cloud. When have you ever seen a disclaimer on any of the ads about backing up your own stuff or having any kind of an alternate plan, never mind a full-up DR, plan because the brown stuff can still hit the fan? I've not even seen it in fine print. People "in the know" automatically understand that but most people aren't "in the know" and some that were also succumbed to the shinny bobble. 😉

Maybe Amazon just wanted to prove that they can do everything bigger than GitHub. 😀

Heh... what we really need is a whole bunch of self driving cars that rely on the IOT so that when something like this happens again and the dashboard won't even give you a warning, the crashing sounds around you will alert you to the problem. 😉

I'm going to forward the link to my VP of Infrastructure because he's got a whole lot of people with their heads in the cloud bugging him about moving to the "more secure cloud". None of our stuff was affected.. not even our refrigerator. 😉

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 8

Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 4:25 PM
jasona.work - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 1:52 PM
Oh so tempting to reply to Steve's posts over in the test forum with a "This didn't work for me, what is wrong with it?"
😀
PEBKAC

Heh... yeah... but they're your chairs. 😉

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 9

Heh... I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw the headline for this one.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/which-cloud-will-give-you-the-biggest-bang-for-the-buck/

As always, "It Depends" on what you mean by "bang". 😉

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 10

Proof that there's a silver lining to every cloud (ba-dum-dum-tish!), I heard that many of the white shirts at Amazon got unexpected bonuses for testing deodorants today.

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004356 More actions · Answer 11

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>

They likely do but it's too hard for them to think. Much easier to ask a question on the forum so they have time to go to the gym. With any luck at all, someone will answer before they get through their 3rd set. 😉

--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)

Thomas Rushton SSC-Insane Points: 22649 More actions · Answer 12

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>

Error messages aren't always helpful.

I wish I'd captured the one from the old workflow & document management system I worked with many years ago. The error box was just:

Caption: Error
Message: Unknown Error
[OK]

I knew what that meant, but only because I'd had to deal with it a few times before. Your average user, on the other hand...

Thomas Rushton
blog: https://thelonedba.wordpress.com

Ed Wagner SSC Guru Points: 287026 More actions · Answer 13

Jeff Moden - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 11:40 PM
...
I'm going to forward the link to my VP of Infrastructure because he's got a whole lot of people with their heads in the cloud bugging him about moving to the "more secure cloud". None of our stuff was affected.. not even our refrigerator. 😉

I did. 😉

Tally Tables - Performance Personified
String Splitting with True Performance
Best practices on how to ask questions

ManicStar SSCoach Points: 17992 More actions · Answer 14

Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 3:18 PM
Code Monkey, the SQL - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 1:30 PM
Lynn Pettis - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:43 PM
< rant> Why can't people READ the error messages? They may be obscure at times but others actually tell you what the problem resides. </ rant>
Yep, like "General Network Error, check your network documentation."
And then can't even trouble shoot the problem correctly. Let's compare the data in the table that is the target of the failing insert instead of the data in the table he is using to insert the data.

In my case that particular error message ended up requiring a call to microsoft who at the 1st level of support was like 'you need to talk to your network admin' I was like 'yeah that's me, now what do we do? '. Lost 2 weeks of my life over someone's inability to properly trap an error and give a sensible error message. I'm all for reading error messages, but for gawd's sake developer people, make them sensible! Somehow tell me the component is spawning zombie threads that are eating up the available pool, but don't tell me to 'check my network documentation'.

Sergiy SSC Guru Points: 110208 More actions · Answer 15

Code Monkey, the SQL - Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:46 AM
In my case that particular error message ended up requiring a call to microsoft who at the 1st level of support was like 'you need to talk to your network admin' I was like 'yeah that's me, now what do we do? '. Lost 2 weeks of my life over someone's inability to properly trap an error and give a sensible error message. I'm all for reading error messages, but for gawd's sake developer people, make them sensible! Somehow tell me the component is spawning zombie threads that are eating up the available pool, but don't tell me to 'check my network documentation'.

😀😀😀

In one ofbig projects I've been involved in the front-end developer did not have time to set up all the right error messages, so for 2+ years into Production we had a single error message thrown by all CATCH blocks anywhere in the system.
And guess what did that message say?
Yep. "Possible Network Error"
:hehe:

_____________
Code for TallyGenerator