April 10, 2019 at 10:31 pm
My $0.02 about the new site...
Thanks, Alan. I'll address a few items.
URL Redirections are a high priority item and still being worked. Lots have been fixed, some still broken. Jeff's Delimited article is fixed, yours isn't, but I added it to the ticket as a test item. Also, Google/bing/etc are recrawling the site, so search links are being updated. Posted links in blogs, forums, etc. are things we can't control so URL rewrites are being updated on our side.
You should be able to see your own articles. I think your page is broken for you for some reason. My guess is that somewhere between login accounts, user names, and article authors (previously very separate data elements), something broke in migration. I've posted a note on your articles.
Likes and Answers, We had relatively little usage of this feature, so we didn't port it. However, it's likely something that enough of you like that we need to add it back. I've filed a bug for this.
I'm glad SSC helped you and I know this is a hard transition. It's hard for me as well, but this will improve over time and we will get used to the changes.
April 10, 2019 at 10:39 pm
A couple of notes. There is an author page at /author. This was added. We also have the Contributors link at the bottom, which is a horrible name and a bug filed to change this. That has authors.
If you click an author, you should get to a page of their articles. For example, the latest article from Mike Byrd has his name linked to: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Mike-Byrd
Ed, your page is here: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Ed-Wagner
On that page is an "All Authors" link. Again, bug filed to make this more prominent. That links to: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author
This page is a mess because it combines blogs and articles, so bug filed to clean this up. I'd prefer we not count blogs, but we do want to count stairway and editorial pieces.
Thanks for continuing to support us, or at least, me. I am pushing to get things fixed, and they are, albiet slowly. I am posting status updates in the Announcements forum: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/forum/sqlservercentral-com/sqlservercentral-com-announcements
April 10, 2019 at 10:45 pm
Some of this is the result of the times we are in. We all know the pressure of release and fix it later competing with if everything gets fixed first, we will never release. I imagine it was quite the internal struggle with when to release, and see they have made a number of fixes. This site is free, and there are many truly world class contributors to which we are all thankful for. The developers might be in a no win situation - likely not using the site, or calling the shots. I can also remember times in my career where people would sign off on their QA testing, we would release, then have an emergency fix and migration to production. This was with scripts documenting tests and paid employees. In today’s world, the pressure of speed takes more precedent over quality than many of us like. Probably something many of us wish we had more control over. I just hope that even though there is frustration out there, that it doesn’t stop the fantastic help from continuing to contribute. That would be a much larger loss than a less than seamless upgrade.
I totally agree with that's what the world has come to. That same shinola attitude is likely responsible for the 737 MAX deaths and that bank that crashed and burned a while back because of cruddy software. It's a totally stupid attitude by managers and developers alike. "We have to do something even if it's wrong" is what all that boils down to and it's disgusting. Anyone that accepts such a thing needs to be summarily drummed out of the business for their DILIGAF attitude and resulting horrible performance.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
April 10, 2019 at 10:47 pm
With regards to mobile and formatting: We've been struggling with rankings and usage for awhile. Google/Bing/etc continues to de-rank sites for not having a compliant mobile version. That was us, and we had to move. The site renders differently on mobile devices (or smaller devices), and we don't necessarily need all this whitespace, but we are also cognizant of the width issues with formatting content. I think we might be a bit narrow now, and I hope to do some styling experimentation once we settle some bugs down.
Just for perspective, while some of you don't like this format, for over a decade I've gotten constant complaints about how old, poorly done, hard to read, cramped, etc., that the old format was. I've pushed back and avoided moving on, but realize in changing underlying platforms that some of the old styling needed to go.
We are more flexible now, and I suspect we can start to allow some individual custom styles in the future. Making changes on this platform is much easier, and more importantly, we have skills in house. We didn't have that before.
Suggestions for styling are welcome, just note they may take awhile. I'll also say that anytime a large site changes, there are lots of complaints that die away as people develop new habits and muscle memory. I hated the Books Online change a couple years ago, and still find issues, but I'm much more used to it now. Not to say that your complaints aren't valid, but they're partially based on wanting a familiar feel and partially on things that are difficult for you to work with. I am continuing to push for change and filing issues that we have to triage, debate, evaluate, and fix.
April 10, 2019 at 11:49 pm
Grant Fritchey wrote:The Dixie Flatline wrote:And this thread just keeps on keeping on... This is a pure rant, so read at your own risk. I have been involved in the interview process for a senior sql developer at my company and have yet to find a candidate possessing even intermediate-level knowledge. Two different people have told me that the questions I ask are "brutal." (What is a covering index? Do you use WITH(NOLOCK)? If so why? How would you make sure that an insert to table A followed by an update to table B is treated as a single atomic transaction?) The candidates are supposedly being screened before they get to the interview, and all look godlike on paper. Looking at a resume' appears to be wasted time. Am I just being too demanding, or have any of y'all had a similar experience?
Similar experiences. I really think lots of people have 1-2 years of experience that is then multiplied out to their current time-in-rate. Your questions honestly don't sound that tough either. One of my was "What's the difference between a deadlock and a block?" I even spelled out the words so there would be no confusion. Almost every single time, I got a careful explanation of blocking followed by an equally careful explanation of blocking (no, not typos).
Aside from the apparently omnipresent inability to regurgitate "getdate()" or any of the several other methods of retrieving the current system time with t-sql one of the funniest was in an interview about 5 years ago. I asked the candidate (who had already failed the getdate question), "Can you explain sql injection and some things we can do to avoid it". I was treated to a nearly 5 minute monologue that spanned the whole gamut of crazy. They talked about locking, they talked about dependency injection in c#, and a few other random paths finally ending on some explanation about how sql injection can be leveraged when implementing CLR to avoid having to know the datatypes ahead of time. I then asked them to explain the concept of Reflection in dotnet (which seemed vaguely like what they were trying to explain) and was this time given a much better answer. "I don't know too much about that". These people are out there and they are taking our jobs. Worse though is that they are writing code that we are going to inherit at some point.
Heh... all I'm going to say here is "don't get me started". 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
April 11, 2019 at 12:43 am
I'm mostly OK with the redesign and haven't run into problems, but that's more because of an issue which isn't a fault of the site redesign...
I can't get logged in when I'm at work because the connection times out. Frankly, I strongly suspect this to be caused by how locked down our network is, so I've got to live with it.
There's a few things I think could be done to improve the site still further, such as showing which forum a post is from when looking at the list from Active / Latest / Most Popular but really I'll call that a nitpick.
April 11, 2019 at 12:52 am
That's logged as a bug 😉
April 11, 2019 at 11:00 am
The candidates are supposedly being screened before they get to the interview, and all look godlike on paper. Looking at a resume' appears to be wasted time. Am I just being too demanding, or have any of y'all had a similar experience?
That's been the norm for at least 30 years, for recruiting in all branches of software development and support and maintenance. 45 years ago things were different - probably because the job applicants wrote their own resumés, they weren't written by recruitment agents.
Tom
April 11, 2019 at 11:17 am
If you click an author, you should get to a page of their articles. For example, the latest article from Mike Byrd has his name linked to: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Mike-Byrd Ed, your page is here: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Ed-Wagner
That's a new fix since I last looked, so thank you, Steve. The files attached to the articles are still missing, but I get the "one bug at a time" approach.
April 11, 2019 at 11:31 am
How about people that just implement missing index recommendations that create a nonclustered index that is a covering index and recreates the entire table? Yes, I found one in a copy of a production database.
I wrote a script that took all missing index recommendations and built them, automatically. Yeah, I killed performance in that database and learned better. We all screw up at one time or another, just me more than most.
"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
April 11, 2019 at 12:40 pm
Alan Burstein wrote:My $0.02 about the new site... First, I miss the count of likes (for threads and individual comments). No nobody knows if you "liked" a thread or comment. As someone with articles published - my bigger concern though is what has happened to the Google search results for SSC. If I search for DelimitedSplit8K, for example I Jeff's article would be the first result. Now it's not even on the first Google search page. I noticed too that the article URLS have changed (e.g. My N-Grams article used to be https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/142316/ but now it's https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/nasty-fast-n-grams-part-1-character-level-unigrams.) The old URL is still coming up in Google searches. I wonder how big of a problem this is. Lastly - If you are an author you cannot see a list of your own articles. If you have something published on SSC - go to your article and click on your name at the top of the article. This is not a problem when I look at other authors, just my own stuff; I get: Oops! That page can’t be found. All this said - SSC has changed my career. It's still my home and the best site for learning about SQL Server.
The broken likes problem is pretty significant. And yeah, there's no Authors page and I can't see a list of my own articles. Granted, I didn't have many, but I can't even see the short list. The other major problem with the articles is that the attached files are gone. For people that do what I do and attach the SQL files with all the code, it makes the article far less useful. SSC has also had a really positive impact on my career as well. For the most part, it's a great community of people helping others.
You can see your own articles if you click on the top right corner link "Write For Us" which links to https://www.sqlservercentral.com/contributions
April 11, 2019 at 2:40 pm
Problem is that the person doing this doesn't care and doesn't test. He thinks he knows it all and doesn't listen to my recommendations when I can demonstrate that what he has done or written doesn't work well.
April 11, 2019 at 3:53 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:If you click an author, you should get to a page of their articles. For example, the latest article from Mike Byrd has his name linked to: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Mike-Byrd Ed, your page is here: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/author/Ed-Wagner
That's a new fix since I last looked, so thank you, Steve. The files attached to the articles are still missing, but I get the "one bug at a time" approach.
But now we have the interesting game that each QOTD is listed as an article. I'm not sure whether I like that or not.
Tom
April 11, 2019 at 3:57 pm
But now we have the interesting game that each QOTD is listed as an article. I'm not sure whether I like that or not.
Speaking of the QOTD, did the link in the Newsletter today lead to the actual QOTD for anyone today? My newsletter had:
What is the default memory limit that SQL Server on Linux will use?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.
but if you do "click here", you go to an article called "Data Compression Double Take". And if I go to the QOTD page it's yesterday's.
Thom~
Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
Larnu.uk
April 11, 2019 at 4:01 pm
That's interesting. I clicked the newsletter now for the "Click HerE" and went to today's Linux question
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