Uh oh. Somebody got out of the cranky side of bed this morning.

In my experience, unless you're in a union shop you really can't afford to be that literal...

Take the moral high road by not snooping and you'll end up in front of some executive committee explaining how the pirated software/porn/viruses ended up on your system and resulted...

Virtuoso coding, certainly, but why not take advantage of SQL Server's ability to create custom aggregation functions? Microsoft's example can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182741.aspx

I think employers underestimate the value of giving geeks paid time to play with new technology. There's not a lot of cost there, especially if you can work it...

I agree, education is great. Now I think we've beaten that particular topic to death, Steve. Can we talk about something else?

What about the need to take control...

I think developers ought to take certification out of the hands of Microsoft (for which certification is simply a lucrative side business driven by HR departments which can't be bothered...

Wow! I had to look at the replies just to see how many geeks had a hissy fit about the difference between average and median. Not one! ...

How you store the date is less important than how you retrieve it.

I inherited an application in which every SQL query had a WHERE clause based on <event time field>...

Ha! I think you ought to read the book "The Undercover Economist"...

I agree with GSquared. There's no magic number; it depends on how much time might pass before problems are detected and how hard it is to recreate the data...

That the proposed solution meets the requirements of the client/user is simply a given (assuming of course they don't violate the laws of physics or of the state).

I think goodness...

Seems pretty straight forward to me:

if effort_required_to_do_it_right < effort_required_to_hack_it_together + SUM(effort_required_to_fix_it * probability_fix_is_required) then

do_it_right

else

hack_it_together

end if

🙂

I'd be willing to bet that the reason most people don't unit test is not because it's boring; it's because the boss wanted the solution yesterday. Boredom would be...

Whew! If it weren't for the fact that I'm enough of a geezer to remember Knuth and Thompson I'd have failed that one. 😉

At least this interview test...

I agree. DBAs need to get out more.

I once had a DBA ask me if I'd mind phoning a client for him because he "didn't like talking to clients".

I...