October 31, 2011 at 7:09 am
phil.wood 94423 (10/31/2011)
Great question????!!!!!How is knowing this going to help me in my career?
Please let's avoid pointless questions like this in future! It was pointless, quite literally, for me since I got it wrong. I wasn't going to have a go but I felt I needed to in order to get into the discussion!
Rant over.
I would assume you are one of the ones who think that art, music, and history are worthless in public school because it doesn't help you get a career? Before you answer, realize that I am a DBA for a Fortune 20 company and my undergraduate (AND graduate too) degree is in ancient Greek and Latin. May not have directly helped me get a job but helped make me who I am and I still got a job.
Every major division of arts and sciences has a "history of" branch, and computing is no different. This is a "history of SQL Server" question. Does it help you technically do your daily job? No. Is it part of being in a larger community? I think so.
October 31, 2011 at 7:17 am
A bit of trivia for a Monday morning.
October 31, 2011 at 7:21 am
Cadavre (10/31/2011)
Thomas Abraham (10/31/2011)
I definitely can see both sides of that way of thinking. Pride makes you want to be able to answer a question from your own memory/knowledge. I get that.However, I've had a lot of different jobs in my life: Banker, Stock Broker, Navy Officer, DBA, Salesman, Programmer, Customer Service Manager,etc. If I had had to do those jobs with only the knowledge I had in my head, I would have been fired from every one of them. Instead, I brought a core set of knowledge, learned the rest along the way, and relied heavily on other people or sources of information for help. Did I earn my pay? I'd like to think so. My employers never seemed to care how I knew the answers to a problem - only that it got solved. I bring the same approach to answering the QotD.
I see your point, and in a job of course you would use google and other references to perform to the best of your abilities. But to me, the QOTD is just a bit of fun, so if I get it wrong then it's not the end of the world. If it's something that is relevant, then after answering I may go off and research it. But I always answer from my head rather than using reference materials.
Can't speak to other people's motivations but I (almost) always look up the answers, even when I'm sure that I know the answer. For me, not only do I get a full explanation of the answer by looking it up but I usually learn something else by reading the explanation/following the related links. It's nice getting the points for the questions, but the usable knowledge is better.
October 31, 2011 at 7:29 am
Ernie Schlangen (10/31/2011)
Can't speak to other people's motivations but I (almost) always look up the answers, even when I'm sure that I know the answer. For me, not only do I get a full explanation of the answer by looking it up but I usually learn something else by reading the explanation/following the related links. It's nice getting the points for the questions, but the usable knowledge is better.
I have to agree with Ernie. These days I find it hard to map out big chunks of time to learn new things - too many commitments maybe. At any rate, the QotD is a good excuse to incrementally augment my knowledge, especially in areas not immediately related to my current work focus. Plus, it comes in (usually) easily digestible bite-size pieces, better for us older dogs. 😉 Now if I could just get some egg yolk for a bright, shiny coat!
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October 31, 2011 at 8:17 am
Any reason they went away from the names referencing beasts in mythology?
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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October 31, 2011 at 8:40 am
Is this going to be on the test?
October 31, 2011 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the fun question. Fairly worthless knowledge but fun nonetheless.
October 31, 2011 at 11:04 am
Ernie Schlangen (10/31/2011)
Can't speak to other people's motivations but I (almost) always look up the answers, even when I'm sure that I know the answer. For me, not only do I get a full explanation of the answer by looking it up but I usually learn something else by reading the explanation/following the related links. It's nice getting the points for the questions, but the usable knowledge is better.
If the question is something I know I don't know and can't see any reasonable way of deducing the answer (with a decent probability or its being correct) from things I do know and what I believe to be how MS goes about things, I'll start reading chunks of BoL or other appropriate bits of MSDN (because if I learn things by following the chain through the documentation and getting the context I'm more likely to remember them than if I'm directed straight to the bottom level page that is what's usually referenced in the explanation.
If I find I'm getting nowhere like that, I might resort to google - that brings up a lot of unreliable stuff (which I can easily recognise when it includes statements that I know are incorrect, but it doesn't always include such statements) so it's not where I start from because sorting the wheat from the chaff is a pain, it's easier to start from something almost always trustworthy like BoL. But I definitely will resort to google when stuck.
A question like this one is difficult for most people because google is probably the only way to dig out stuff that old (I'm pretty sure it's not on any microsoft website) so Google is the only resort.
Having had a longish experience with RDBMS and SQL I could eliminate SQL95 (wrong date - I'm sure there's have been a big fuss if something codenamed SQL95 had slipped into 96, and I didn't remember any such fuss), and my experience with SQL Server itself allowed me to eliminate Shiloh, Yukon, and Katmai because I remembered those ones. I seemed to remember Sphinx from somewhere too - and as I was sure I had never encountered the codeword for SQL 6.5 that eliminated Sphinx too. So I was reasonably sure it had to be Hydra, but thought I'd check it and googled SQL Server Hydra and found a blog entry at SQLServerPedia (a blog that I feel I can trust more than wikipedia) which confirmed it.
Tom
October 31, 2011 at 11:30 am
A fun question for a holiday. At least it was supposed to be for me, but a little behind.
It's a bit of trivia, totally useless, but we stick those in there at times. If you don't find it to be useful, you don't have to answer or spend time.
October 31, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (10/31/2011)
A fun question for a holiday. At least it was supposed to be for me, but a little behind.It's a bit of trivia, totally useless, but we stick those in there at times. If you don't find it to be useful, you don't have to answer or spend time.
Not totally useless. The discussion gives us a clue as to which people are so boring that they hate a question that might be regarded as mildly interesting trivia - perhaps people whose posts we are probably safe to ignore in future. It's useful to have questions that generate such useful warning information.
Tom
November 1, 2011 at 3:22 am
I agree with Tom - questions like this serve as a good warning of those who have so little going on in their lives that they find things like the code name of an obsolte version of the software to be somehow 'interesting' 😉
November 1, 2011 at 5:58 am
Why all the complaints? Every Microsoft product has a codename. Would everyone be so upset if the question asked what the codename for the next release is?
http://brittcluff.blogspot.com/
November 1, 2011 at 6:18 am
Britt Cluff (11/1/2011)
Why all the complaints? Every Microsoft product has a codename. Would everyone be so upset if the question asked what the codename for the next release is?
Probably not. The complainers are those so boringly and focussedly materialistic that a question that is merely fun makes them complain on the grounds that it isn't (as they see it) useful. Knowing the codename of the next release may actually be useful, so that question wouldn't be merely fun, so the materialists wouldn't complain. The great value of fun questions is therefore that they help us identify the boring materialists in the community.
Tom
November 1, 2011 at 7:04 am
...for a given value of 'fun'
November 1, 2011 at 7:44 am
I agree. Let's get rid of everything that isn't useful. Movies are useless to help me get a job or to keep me healthy. Let's stop making and selling them. Same with fiction literature. Sports? Totally useless at the professional level. Let's cancel all professional sporting leagues. Only useful things matter, after all.
Point is this: utillity is not the sole criterion for evaluating the worth of an item. The question yesterday was not practical in helping us do our job, but it was valuable in that it supported the history of SQL Server, something that is worth remembering, just as history is always valuable.
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