Jeff Moden (3/14/2013)
allmhuran (3/14/2013)I'm not sure what happened to this forum, the level of courtesy and respect seems to have dropped off. Perhaps it has become too cliquey.
Nah... don't let a couple of answers that you consider to be rude ruin it for you. There's a ton of good folks on this forum including some of the ones that you thought were rude. They've (actually, we've) got your best interest at heart even if they (we) come across a little heavy handed or miss a read on a post now and then.
You should see me when someone posts something like a recursive CTE or While loop that counts sequentially and insists that is HAS to be done that way. There's also a lot lost in the written word.
If you really want to do a litmus test on rudeness, post a question about a table design that uses an IDENTITY column named "ID" and wait for a certain famous author to show up.
Haha, yeah, no doubt.
I remember having some good debates with Mr Celko a few times back in the days when microsoft.public.sqlserver and microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming were the primary sources of good information. But I also remember a lot of bad debates there, and I've definitely seen them here (edit: and understand why people get short after a while. I remember one regarding whether updates of the form set col.x=col.x actually cause changes on the page... that one was hilarious as an observer). I'm quite familiar with most of the names here even though I'm a bit of a lurker most of the time. I figured Gail was just having a rough day, so no harm no foul. I think I migrated from usenet to here in around 2007. IIRC one of the first things I saw that made me think "yep, here is good" was something to do with your formatting preferences Jeff 🙂
PS: I agree with Joe on the "ID" thing. ISO11179 suggests that leaving out the class term when there is no qualification term is a bad idea. I tend to go along with the high level principles of ISO11179... which I first saw referenced in a post from Mr C on usenet many years ago! But I less strictly opposed to the idea of a surrogate key, as long as the dev knows why they need it 😉