Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Are the posted questions getting worse?

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Ed Wagner SSC Guru Points: 287024 More actions · Answer 1

Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"

I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.

Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.

Tally Tables - Performance Personified
String Splitting with True Performance
Best practices on how to ask questions

Ed Wagner SSC Guru Points: 287024 More actions · Answer 2

Grant Fritchey - Friday, September 8, 2017 5:32 AM
Fellow Threadizens!
Today is my last day of work before Red Gate makes me take a six week sabbatical. I'll try answering a few questions today and then I'm off until October. Hold down the fort. Keep the powder dry. Remember to shoot the officers first.

Six-weeks? That's awesome. Have a great time and take the time to enjoy it. We expect a report of where you went when you get back.

Tally Tables - Performance Personified
String Splitting with True Performance
Best practices on how to ask questions

Thom A SSC Guru Points: 99126 More actions · Answer 3

Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.

I still don't understand why he insists that keys must be stored as a string (or not a numeric). Why not use an int IDENTITY column, which uses a whole 4 bytes, to store > 4 billion unique values? Using a varchar would be 13 bytes to store the same number of character (10 digits, negative symbol, +2 bytes). Why does it matter if I'm not doing maths on the field? It serves the purpose, it's UNIQUE. It really frustrates me every time I see that rant from him, and he seems to make it in almost every post.

Thom~

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

Tom_Hogan Hall of Fame Points: 3875 More actions · Answer 4

Lynn Pettis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:53 PM
Where is the petition to ban JC?

Please follow ANSI/ISO standards when posting a petition.

Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286573 More actions · Answer 5

Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.

And his comment that most commercial software is written in COBOL. Where does he come up with this nonsense. I know of exactly nobody who still writes anything in COBOL. Yet I see dozens and dozens of dotnet developer jobs hit my desk every week. Sure there may still be a few companies whose backbone is still running COBOL but those are fading as many of them have realized that having flexible systems is more and more crucial. The worst part of it though is that he constantly contradicts himself by being so steadfast in absolutes.

_______________________________________________________________

Need help? Help us help you.

Read the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/ for best practices on asking questions.

Need to split a string? Try Jeff Modens splitter http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/.

Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 1 – Converting Rows to Columns - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63681/
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 2 - Dynamic Cross Tabs - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Crosstab/65048/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 1) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 2) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 6

Tom_Hogan - Friday, September 8, 2017 9:01 AM
Lynn Pettis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:53 PM
Where is the petition to ban JC?
Please follow ANSI/ISO standards when posting a petition.

ROFLMAO! That's too funny! 😉

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 7

Grant Fritchey - Friday, September 8, 2017 5:32 AM
Fellow Threadizens!
Today is my last day of work before Red Gate makes me take a six week sabbatical. I'll try answering a few questions today and then I'm off until October. Hold down the fort. Keep the powder dry. Remember to shoot the officers first.

You'll only know if you've been gone long enough when you forget your passwords, some of them run out while you're gone, and you forget the phone number for morning scrum. 😉

Enjoy your time off, Grant. Lord knows you deserve it.

--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)

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 8

Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"

Me too except, as someone else said, he's a well known "expert" with a lot of books out there and he comes across as very "knowing" and "authoritative" and so the concern is that newbies will actually listen to his poorly formulated and uniformed rhetoric.

I don't understand why RedGate tolerates him nor why they've got him either on payroll or on contract. They say he's nice in person but that doesn't matter here on the boards where he comes across like a total jerk. Thank goodness he doesn't actually have much or any influence (that I can see) on the ANSI/ISO committees any more (if he actually ever did have, as he claims).

--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)

Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 9

Sean Lange - Friday, September 8, 2017 9:06 AM
Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.
And his comment that most commercial software is written in COBOL. Where does he come up with this nonsense. I know of exactly nobody who still writes anything in COBOL. Yet I see dozens and dozens of dotnet developer jobs hit my desk every week. Sure there may still be a few companies whose backbone is still running COBOL but those are fading as many of them have realized that having flexible systems is more and more crucial. The worst part of it though is that he constantly contradicts himself by being so steadfast in absolutes.

I can name you one company (not the one where I currently work) that still runs a COBOL application on a Solaris box with an interpretive (not compiled) version of COBOL. I don't see it going anywhere as long as it has its tentacles (and I helped develop some of them) through out the company. Oh, I haven't worked there since 2005 and I worked there over 11 years.

Ed Wagner SSC Guru Points: 287024 More actions · Answer 10

Thom A - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:58 AM
Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.
I still don't understand why he insists that keys must be stored as a string (or not a numeric). Why not use an int IDENTITY column, which uses a whole 4 bytes, to store > 4 billion unique values? Using a varchar would be 13 bytes to store the same number of character (10 digits, negative symbol, +2 bytes). Why does it matter if I'm not doing maths on the field? It serves the purpose, it's UNIQUE. It really frustrates me every time I see that rant from him, and he seems to make it in almost every post.

Yeah, and then ignores my post when I point out that he's created a 265-byte CI and that it gets inherited by each row in each NCI. I took the time to point our narrow, unique, ever-ascending, non-volatile and my addition of fixed-width. Crickets. His premise of only using numeric types when doing math on it is irrelevant.

Tally Tables - Performance Personified
String Splitting with True Performance
Best practices on how to ask questions

Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 11

Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:04 PM
Lynn Pettis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:10 PM
Chris Harshman - Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:04 PM
Lynn Pettis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 2:33 PM
What is the percentage improvement of process from 1 hour 30 minutes to 13 seconds, other than going plaid.
LOL, you must be going ludicrous speed! :hehe:
Amazing what you can do when you understand what it takes to work with data using linked servers.
Sounds like great article material, Lynn. Go for it.

Actually, thinking if I could turn this into a presentation for the users group. The biggest pain in the rewrite was the dynamic SQL.

Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 12

Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 11:40 AM
Thom A - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:58 AM
Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.
I still don't understand why he insists that keys must be stored as a string (or not a numeric). Why not use an int IDENTITY column, which uses a whole 4 bytes, to store > 4 billion unique values? Using a varchar would be 13 bytes to store the same number of character (10 digits, negative symbol, +2 bytes). Why does it matter if I'm not doing maths on the field? It serves the purpose, it's UNIQUE. It really frustrates me every time I see that rant from him, and he seems to make it in almost every post.
Yeah, and then ignores my post when I point out that he's created a 265-byte CI and that it gets inherited by each row in each NCI. I took the time to point our narrow, unique, ever-ascending, non-volatile and my addition of fixed-width. Crickets. His premise of only using numeric types when doing math on it is irrelevant.

Your choice of a clustered index can also be driven by data access patterns as well. There are always exceptions to rules which is why our favorite answer seems to be "It depends."

Ed Wagner SSC Guru Points: 287024 More actions · Answer 13

Lynn Pettis - Friday, September 8, 2017 11:58 AM
Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 11:40 AM
Thom A - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:58 AM
Ed Wagner - Friday, September 8, 2017 8:42 AM
Chris Harshman - Friday, September 8, 2017 6:54 AM
Jeff Moden - Thursday, September 7, 2017 6:06 PM
Nah... don't ban him. He needs to take the same kind of s41t that he's been dishing out over the years. If you ban him, we can't do that. 😉
I usually view his posts as comic relief, "here he goes again"
I couldn't believe his latest diatribe about storing datetime values as strings and using YYYY-MM-00 to represent whole months. I think my blood reached the boiling point. I couldn't resist.
Honestly, I find myself wondering if the whole effort was a trolling attempt to observe the reactions of others. The thing is that he's putting forth horrible advice and new people who ready it might actually follow it if nobody posts anything that contradicts his dribble.
I still don't understand why he insists that keys must be stored as a string (or not a numeric). Why not use an int IDENTITY column, which uses a whole 4 bytes, to store > 4 billion unique values? Using a varchar would be 13 bytes to store the same number of character (10 digits, negative symbol, +2 bytes). Why does it matter if I'm not doing maths on the field? It serves the purpose, it's UNIQUE. It really frustrates me every time I see that rant from him, and he seems to make it in almost every post.
Yeah, and then ignores my post when I point out that he's created a 265-byte CI and that it gets inherited by each row in each NCI. I took the time to point our narrow, unique, ever-ascending, non-volatile and my addition of fixed-width. Crickets. His premise of only using numeric types when doing math on it is irrelevant.
Your choice of a clustered index can also be driven by data access patterns as well. There are always exceptions to rules which is why our favorite answer seems to be "It depends."

Agreed completely. However, I would never pick a 265-byte CI like he did. Quite simply, it was too wide and not ascending. I know...I used the word "never" but in this case, I can't think of a single instance over the last 25+ years where I would have even considered such a thing.

Tally Tables - Performance Personified
String Splitting with True Performance
Best practices on how to ask questions

Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286573 More actions · Answer 14

Lynn Pettis - Friday, September 8, 2017 11:06 AM
Sean Lange - Friday, September 8, 2017 9:06 AM
And his comment that most commercial software is written in COBOL. Where does he come up with this nonsense. I know of exactly nobody who still writes anything in COBOL. Yet I see dozens and dozens of dotnet developer jobs hit my desk every week. Sure there may still be a few companies whose backbone is still running COBOL but those are fading as many of them have realized that having flexible systems is more and more crucial. The worst part of it though is that he constantly contradicts himself by being so steadfast in absolutes.
I can name you one company (not the one where I currently work) that still runs a COBOL application on a Solaris box with an interpretive (not compiled) version of COBOL. I don't see it going anywhere as long as it has its tentacles (and I helped develop some of them) through out the company. Oh, I haven't worked there since 2005 and I worked there over 11 years.

Like I said I figured there are still some companies using COBOL. But if you subscribe to JC's mindset it is everywhere. I just don't think that is true anymore.

_______________________________________________________________

Need help? Help us help you.

Read the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/ for best practices on asking questions.

Need to split a string? Try Jeff Modens splitter http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/.

Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 1 – Converting Rows to Columns - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63681/
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 2 - Dynamic Cross Tabs - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Crosstab/65048/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 1) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 2) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/

ZZartin SSC-Dedicated Points: 30894 More actions · Answer 15

Sean Lange - Friday, September 8, 2017 12:24 PM
Lynn Pettis - Friday, September 8, 2017 11:06 AM
Sean Lange - Friday, September 8, 2017 9:06 AM
And his comment that most commercial software is written in COBOL. Where does he come up with this nonsense. I know of exactly nobody who still writes anything in COBOL. Yet I see dozens and dozens of dotnet developer jobs hit my desk every week. Sure there may still be a few companies whose backbone is still running COBOL but those are fading as many of them have realized that having flexible systems is more and more crucial. The worst part of it though is that he constantly contradicts himself by being so steadfast in absolutes.
I can name you one company (not the one where I currently work) that still runs a COBOL application on a Solaris box with an interpretive (not compiled) version of COBOL. I don't see it going anywhere as long as it has its tentacles (and I helped develop some of them) through out the company. Oh, I haven't worked there since 2005 and I worked there over 11 years.
Like I said I figured there are still some companies using COBOL. But if you subscribe to JC's mindset it is everywhere. I just don't think that is true anymore.

There are plenty of companies still maintaining and actively developing cobol code, main frame hardware is also still being maintained and updated. However I don't think any company is going to sit down look at a list of platforms for their new solution and go damn, cobol sounds like the perfect fit for us.