I Love Editorials

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I Love Editorials

Grant Fritchey

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October 18, 2025 at 2:00 pm

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Site Owners SSC Guru Points: 80412 More actions · Answer 1

Thanks for posting your issue and hopefully someone will answer soon.

This is an automated bump to increase visibility of your question.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004664 More actions · Answer 2

I think opinions are great for the same reasons as you, Grant. Just not when it comes to things like code. I've seen way too many things that turned out to be totally incorrect and some have even garnered the label of "Best Practice" when, in fact, some of those things have been a worst practice.

And then there's people that do testing to prove their work... Since I do that all of the time, how could I complain about such a thing? It's all the the people that create 6 rows of unique data and then make 10,000 copies of those 6 rows and call that a "good data set". Nothing that large with a cardinality of only 6 even comes close to being a "good data set".

So... most of the time, I have to fallback to what Edwards W. Deming observed...

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion".

My add-on to that would be "Without KNOWN GOOD data, you're just another person with an opinion... and your opinion of what 'Good Data' is may leave a whole lot to be desired".

--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:
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Audionova Old Hand Points: 349 More actions · Answer 3

Jeff Moden wrote:

I think opinions are great for the same reasons as you, Grant. Just not when it comes to things like code. I've seen way too many things that turned out to be totally incorrect and some have even garnered the label of "Best Practice" when, in fact, some of those things have been a worst practice.
And then there's people that do testing to prove their work... Since I do that all of the time, how could I complain about such a thing? It's all the the people that create 6 rows of unique data and then make 10,000 copies of those 6 rows and call that a "good data set". Nothing that large with a cardinality of only 6 even comes close to being a "good data set".
So... most of the time, I have to fallback to what Edwards W. Deming observed... "Without data, you're just another person with an opinion".
My add-on to that would be "Without KNOWN GOOD data, you're just another person with an opinion... and your opinion of what 'Good Data' is may leave a whole lot to be desired".

Really insightful Jeff, I totally agree. I do think that if people are striving to be objective, they need to go a step BEYOND the data itself though and look at the metrology behind that data.

I find all too often that people evangelize different things as "data driven", or that their opinions are "in-line with the data" only to look closer at how that data was gathered and find dubious, if not outright nefarious, metrology behind the data to ensure it fits a narrative.

Data is not information, to quote an old saying "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics".

This reply was modified 2 weeks, 4 days ago by Audionova.