Are the posted questions getting worse?

  • Jeffery Williams - Monday, October 22, 2018 12:45 PM

    Because you my friend are a 6 figure employee. You are one of the top paid people in many organizations and you OWN the data. it is the job and you honestly you should be damn proud of it!! MANY MANY of us here in the forum love our jobs; take great pride in fixing or make work what nobody else can; we are damn near magic.

    If you are not embracing these attributes you may very well be going down the wrong career path :).

    So when this sort of thing happens to you, you just "Thank you, sir.  Give me more."
    Brandie was just just blowing off some steam before digging into the problem(s).

  • Lynn Pettis - Monday, October 22, 2018 12:51 PM

    So when this sort of thing happens to you, you just "Thank you, sir.  Give me more."
    Brandie was just just blowing off some steam before digging into the problem(s).

    Yes, I was blowing off steam. But I hate being blamed for delaying projects when I have to remind people the bright shiny thing they're chasing will break multiple processes because they forgot to check their business rules and verify that the shiny thing could be deployed to production in 3 weeks. And of course, they didn't bother to check with IT 6 months ago when they started chasing the bright shiny, so now they're mad at IT for "last minute project roadblocks."

    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.

  • When I see something like this stated in a forum post, I kind of shut off.  

    I've got thirty years of experience with rdbms tuning, the last 17 years focused on SQL Server. I've had only a handful of dbs where the proper clustering for a majority of tables was an identity column. There's most often something much better.

    Yes, one should check index usage stats, missing index stats, cardinality and other things, but most often, identity is the wrong clustering for best overalloverall performance. All the I/O from the gazillions of covering indexes really adds up.

    Michael L John
    If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
    To properly post on a forum:
    http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/

  • Michael L John - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 11:27 AM

    When I see something like this stated in a forum post, I kind of shut off.  

    I've got thirty years of experience with rdbms tuning, the last 17 years focused on SQL Server. I've had only a handful of dbs where the proper clustering for a majority of tables was an identity column. There's most often something much better.

    Yes, one should check index usage stats, missing index stats, cardinality and other things, but most often, identity is the wrong clustering for best overalloverall performance. All the I/O from the gazillions of covering indexes really adds up.

    Yeah, that kind of blanket assumption kinda makes me shake my head. Whatever happened to "it depends?"

    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.

  • Lynn Pettis - Monday, October 22, 2018 12:51 PM

    So when this sort of thing happens to you, you just "Thank you, sir.  Give me more."
    Brandie was just just blowing off some steam before digging into the problem(s).

    Fair enough.

    <hr noshade size=1 width=250 color=#BBC8E5> Regards,Jeffery Williams http://www.linkedin.com/in/jwilliamsoh

  • 2 threads, 8 posts, and only 1 contributor.  Is he trying to inflate his numbers?

    Drew

    J. Drew Allen
    Business Intelligence Analyst
    Philadelphia, PA

  • drew.allen - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 2:22 PM

    2 threads, 8 posts, and only 1 contributor.  Is he trying to inflate his numbers?

    Drew

    Whom?

  • Lynn Pettis - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 2:55 PM

    drew.allen - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 2:22 PM

    2 threads, 8 posts, and only 1 contributor.  Is he trying to inflate his numbers?

    Drew

    Whom?

    Here's one of the threads  Having conversations with oneself.

    J. Drew Allen
    Business Intelligence Analyst
    Philadelphia, PA

  • drew.allen - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 3:31 PM

    Here's one of the threads  Having conversations with oneself.

    He has actually been around a while.  It looks like he solved his own problem and corrected what he found to be wrong.  I don't see anything wrong with that.

  • So, seeing Lynn's reply to this: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/2005945/I-need-to-combine-two-unrelated-queries-to-produce-needed-results I was curious about something.

    When you post a reply to an obviously easy question like that, that's a query to give them what they want, do you not worry about how the performance of the query would be?  I mean, obviously (using the topic as an example,) there's things you can't know about their system from the post (indexes, etc) so there's not a lot you can do, but do you try to throw something together that ought to perform at leas OK, or do you just throw out the first thing that will work and d*mn the performance?

    Arguably, I can see it being the latter, after all, we *ARE* doing this for free...

  • jasona.work - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 5:56 AM

    So, seeing Lynn's reply to this: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/2005945/I-need-to-combine-two-unrelated-queries-to-produce-needed-results I was curious about something.

    When you post a reply to an obviously easy question like that, that's a query to give them what they want, do you not worry about how the performance of the query would be?  I mean, obviously (using the topic as an example,) there's things you can't know about their system from the post (indexes, etc) so there's not a lot you can do, but do you try to throw something together that ought to perform at leas OK, or do you just throw out the first thing that will work and d*mn the performance?

    Arguably, I can see it being the latter, after all, we *ARE* doing this for free...

    Well, we can't test for performance in cases like this. We don't have our systems set up like the OPs and the OP asked a very specific question. Presumably the OP will come back if there's a performance issue or resolve the issue him/herself.

    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.

  • Brandie Tarvin - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 6:02 AM

    jasona.work - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 5:56 AM

    So, seeing Lynn's reply to this: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/2005945/I-need-to-combine-two-unrelated-queries-to-produce-needed-results I was curious about something.

    When you post a reply to an obviously easy question like that, that's a query to give them what they want, do you not worry about how the performance of the query would be?  I mean, obviously (using the topic as an example,) there's things you can't know about their system from the post (indexes, etc) so there's not a lot you can do, but do you try to throw something together that ought to perform at leas OK, or do you just throw out the first thing that will work and d*mn the performance?

    Arguably, I can see it being the latter, after all, we *ARE* doing this for free...

    Well, we can't test for performance in cases like this. We don't have our systems set up like the OPs and the OP asked a very specific question. Presumably the OP will come back if there's a performance issue or resolve the issue him/herself.

    jasona.work - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 5:56 AM

    So, seeing Lynn's reply to this: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/2005945/I-need-to-combine-two-unrelated-queries-to-produce-needed-results I was curious about something.

    When you post a reply to an obviously easy question like that, that's a query to give them what they want, do you not worry about how the performance of the query would be?  I mean, obviously (using the topic as an example,) there's things you can't know about their system from the post (indexes, etc) so there's not a lot you can do, but do you try to throw something together that ought to perform at leas OK, or do you just throw out the first thing that will work and d*mn the performance?

    Arguably, I can see it being the latter, after all, we *ARE* doing this for free...

    I hate questions like that... especially the ones that state "I need to.,.".  Seems like there's no manners in posts anymore.  Just stab and grab and not looking for any understanding nor even a glimmer of intellectual curiosity.  Just get it off their plate.

    What really bugs me is that although the question exactly explained what the OP wanted to accomplish, I want to ask why this person, who doesn't even know what a basic CROSS JOIN is, is being paid to write SQL to begin with.

    It might make a good "GETDATE()" icebreaker/litmus strip question.

    To be honest, though, I've started to treat "basic knowledge" posts as persona non grata unless the person does show that glimmer of intellectual curiosity instead of them just asking for (demanding, it seems) a question that will help them succeed when they should already know how or at least have enough gumption to "Google the simple stuff".

    And, yes... I absolutely hate that it has come to that.

    --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)

  • Realise my post is a bit "ranty", but if anyone has input here, I'd greatly appreciate it: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/2006029/NOT-IN-vs-NOT-EXISTS

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • Jeff Moden - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 6:15 AM

    To be honest, though, I've started to treat "basic knowledge" posts as persona non grata unless the person does show that glimmer of intellectual curiosity instead of them just asking for (demanding, it seems) a question that will help them succeed when they should already know how or at least have enough gumption to "Google the simple stuff".

    And, yes... I absolutely hate that it has come to that.

    I try to hint and ask them to do some work or show some effort. I'm happy to help, but I want them to learn a bit if I'm helping.

    I dislike when I've asked what they've done and someone just posts a solution.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 8:54 AM

    I dislike when I've asked what they've done and someone just posts a solution.

    Completely agree on this. Simply providing a solution to most people who slow low effort will likely teach them little, and the code will probably end us in their system/homework as supplied with little to no understanding of how it works. It's even more upsetting if you then the same person asking "how does this work" in a completely separate topic a few months down the line.

    Fortunately, the one's the do want to learn are almost always happy to provide samples of their works, and improve their questions.

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

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