Are the posted questions getting worse?

  • Thom A wrote:

    Phil Parkin wrote:

    david.edwards 76768 wrote:

    I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process using punched card, rolled up and attached to carrier pigeons.

    JC has entered the building.

    Ahh, so the solution will be written in COBOL.

    I know nothing about COBOL or punched cards....... so that should be eminent qualifications for a government IT project 🙂

    "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."
    — Samuel Johnson
    I wonder, would the great Samuel Johnson have replaced that with "GIYF" now?

  • Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

  • Eirikur Eiriksson wrote:

    Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

    Sadly not, Excel 2019 still only supports 1048576 rows.  I suppose for many uses that's plenty but probably not for a national track and trace system.


    On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
    —Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

    How to post a question to get the most help http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537

  • Neil Burton wrote:

    Eirikur Eiriksson wrote:

    Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

    Sadly not, Excel 2019 still only supports 1048576 rows.  I suppose for many uses that's plenty but probably not for a national track and trace system.

    I faced that issue at some point when trying to validate a file using Excel. But I remembered that it showed an error when trying to load a file with more rows than the supported ones. So I just tested by creating a 1.5 million rows csv, and it effectively shows a warning mentioning "File not loaded completely".

    Excel has limitations, but this is a pure human error.

    Luis C.
    General Disclaimer:
    Are you seriously taking the advice and code from someone from the internet without testing it? Do you at least understand it? Or can it easily kill your server?

    How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help: Option 1 / Option 2
  • Excel does have a row limit of 1048576 per tab, of course one can either use multiple tabs or even better, the tabular power query, which does not have any such limits.

    😎

    The problem in this case very simple, wrong tool for the job. Just like the story of the guy who had the lowest quote for constructing an airfield, based on few blokes with wheelbarrows.

  • Couldn't see if it had been mentioned up thread, but I read that the problem was caused by running out of columns, not rows. Apparently each record was added as a column and not a row. If true, words really do fail me.

    -------------------------------Posting Data Etiquette - Jeff Moden [/url]Smart way to ask a question
    There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand (the world). There is no such thing as a dumb question. ― Carl Sagan
    I would never join a club that would allow me as a member - Groucho Marx

  • Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

    how about a table with 498 columns which is updated daily. And updated in a very Interesting way. First, it’s dropped and recreated with only ID column populated with numbers and all others contain NULLs. Then 497 UPDATE statements populate the rest of the columns one by one.

    Did not want to look into index structure because a) my hart is not g that young, and b) there was no point really. One-off indexes - is stupid enough. Still they recreated a bunch of indexes to be used in a report running once a day.

    _____________
    Code for TallyGenerator

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

     

    Sometimes it makes sense if the alternative is just adding a bunch of 1 - 1 extension tables.

  • Mission accomplished.  It only took 4 days.

    Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können

  • What do you get when you get a DBA and a rapper?

    This album

    Luis C.
    General Disclaimer:
    Are you seriously taking the advice and code from someone from the internet without testing it? Do you at least understand it? Or can it easily kill your server?

    How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help: Option 1 / Option 2
  • Well, the past two days have been unique.  Started with a call in the morning from a recruiter about a possible position. After a short discussion it was determined that I was a good fit for the position.  This led to a call from recruiter that works with the client and after a short conversation I soon had a telephone interview scheduled for today at 1:00 PM.  Shortly after this I then received an email from work notifying me that my position with Parsons was ending today as the project I was working on had no more work for me after today and they could not find any other sources of funding for my position.

    So, I interview today for a potential position and at the end of the interview I am offered the position. I start work with the new company on November 16th. In addition, I am getting nice pay raise with the move to the new company. One door closes and another door opens.

    One thing with this position, looks like they are definitely open for bring the database(s) into the CI/CD pipeline as the director I interviewed was very interested in what I talked about when I talked about the Redgate tools. Instead of trying to do something on my own, it looks like I will have support from higher up. So, Steve and Grant, I may finally have a company willing to work with Redgate to implement database life cycle management into the development process. Yea!!

     

  • That's great news Lynn - and awesome timing 🙂

  • Good to hear Lynn. I mean the job thing. Of course I also get excited about selling Redgate software too.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • Heh... some would say that you got "Lucky", Lynn.  I would say that it's where years of preparation and hard work have finally met a good  opportunity (my definition of luck).

    Nicely done and congratulations on what sounds like might be a great job because you're not going to have to brow-beat managers to "let" them see it your way.  Of course, a higher salary also helps.

    Good luck, good Sir!

    --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)

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