I apologize in advance in case this question has been asked already.
I'm working on revamping a reporting application used within my company. The requirements are:
Support addition of new fields (done through web app) and allow users to select those fields when building reports. Currently ther...
@AaronBertrand I'm not a fan of EAV, but my primary objection to it is people using it as their default data model. I don't have a problem with using it when it's legitimately the best model, but that's very rare
@AaronBertrand That's pretty much it - every time I've seen EAV used it's been as a "one EAV table to rule them all" solution and that's what I'm not keen on. I've never seen it used properly, so maybe that's why I'm so anti it.
@SimonRigharts this is like not liking BMWs because you saw someone driving one like a jerk. Just because some people don't use it properly doesn't make it bad. Heck, if you were anti-"everything someone uses poorly" you'd be against all technology.
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells but again, that doesn't make the car bad. Just demonstrates that people associate the stereotype of the car with the type of person driving. I can assure you BMW drivers are not the only bad drivers on the road. And they're still driving nice cars. :-)
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells well there's driving like a jerk (aggressive, I deserve to be first) and driving stupid (too slow in the fast lane, no signal, texting etc). Over here the former is highly weighted toward nice cars, the latter not so much - they're all driving a Toyota Camry or a Hyundai...
@AaronBertrand Right, but there are some things that are abused considerably more often than they're used correctly, which means they're naturally going to get a bad rap
@SimonRigharts That's not strictly true - I've seen a few products that use EAV well. However, bespoke systems built by architecture astronauts are going to outnumber successful products by at least one or two orders of magnitude.
@SimonRigharts This is why we should teach them to use it right, rather than just scare them away from it, IMHO. If they (or their pointy-haired boss) have already decided that EAV is what they're going to do, they're going to do it, and I'd rather give them guidance than just tell themit's a stupid decision.
@SimonRigharts Cursors are horribly overused and abused, but there are still cases where I will recommend them (e.g. running totals pre-2012).
@SimonRigharts Dynamic SQL is fraught with peril, but it's still my go-to method for a lot of problems.
There are only a few things in SQL Server that are "never do that" - auto-shrink and auto-close, for example.
Some people on my team seem to have this idea that joining our large tables is bad. So they take one table and load it into a #table applying a predicate, then take another table and do the same. Then join the tables together. It's driving me crazy.
Join Predicates can cut down the rowset too. You don't need to load 40 million rows into a #table just to get back the 3 million you need!
@Zane I worked with someone like that. He created "temp table waterfalls." What you should do is take one of those examples, have a lunch & learn with them, and show them that the indexes on the table support that join efficiently without all that extra busy work. (Of course create the indexes that support those operations if they in fact don't already exist.) :-)
I did get this guy out of that awful habit, but it took several classroom-style session and my own re-writes to demonstrate to him that the way he thinks about elimination is not the way we want SQL Server to actually do it.
@AaronBertrand The query still performed 20 times faster by changing to my method. It had to range scan more than it does after the proper Index is in place but this was a 3 hour query. Now it's down to a few minutes.
I used to look at the questions and think "I'm not going ot answer that because I know someone else will give a better answer, or I just don't know the answer myself."
I've said it before : as the popularity of this site rises, that will ensure it goes down the exact same slope that SO has gone. Maybe not at the same rate, but same trajectory.
I understand why the do it but I've had at least a hundred interactions on SO where I flag something in the review queue as being a comment only to hear, "He doesn't have enough rep so lay off".
That's still doesn't make it a F'ing answer now does it.
@AaronBertrand I suspect that the alternative is worse - comment spam from bot generated users. At least someone using the account has to get some peer-reviewed answers upvoted without triggering the circlejerk detection mechanism.
I would say the Mod's keep DBA pretty clean though. It still has a few of the best articles I've ever read and is an invaluable resource in my arsenal.
@AaronBertrand I think it's just something the original team did to head it off at the pass. Still, there are plenty of sites with a perennial comment spam problem.
@AaronBertrand Newbie sympathisers. How many times have you seen a shit question get defended and there some knob who's like come on guys he's just new.
Spam gets dealt with by everyone in the entire community pretty quickly. Spam comments get dealt with effectively because anyone can flag them, and I think there is some threshold where a mod doesn't even have to get involved for it to be deleted. Spam answers on the other hand...
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells They actually require more effort than spam comments (see above).
On top of that, people don't down-vote spam answers because it isn't worth 1 rep for them to do so.
@AaronBertrand I suspect that SE has a sufficiently active mod community now that it would happen and the rep threshold for comments might not be necessary.
I suppose you could suggest it on Meta and make a case for it. I think it's quite likely that you are right and the mod community would do the job on their own.
I think flagging an answer as spam should also give an automatic down-vote on the question, at no rep cost to the flagger. Like certain vote to close actions do to a question.
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I've died on my last hill on meta. Not worth it. No matter what my idea is, change is always the devil.
Well I'm just wishing out loud. It's not like the current situation makes it impossible to do all of my mod duties, it's just kind of boring seeing the same type of "answers" from 1-rep people who can't comment. Seems backwards.
The initial reasoning was based on the volume of crap and spam comments on the expert gender change site (and its ilk) so I don't think it was wholly unreasonable at the time. Now, with an active mod community it's pretty likely to be a non-issue.
People are interested in your SSIS talk by the way. of the 14 people who have used the scheduler builder, you were selected as a primary by 3 and alternate by 2 (that's good)
@swasheck That poor girl is going to haunted by that for the rest of her life. Hopefully she doesn't have any children because they'll be haunted too. "Its Friday, Friday, Friday!"
The reason I first put together the KC SQL Saturday is that I wanted some training and couldn't get anyone to pay for me to do it. The dread secret I learned that year was that I never get to attend any of the sessions except my own
It's gotten better over the years but no, I mostly pop in and out of the sessions to see how speakers work with their audience, snap a photo or two, count heads and pop out
Yeah, year one was just unsane with all the little fires we had to attend to
Now that we don't do anywhere near as much printing and crap, the amount of work required is greatly lessened. It's mostly make sure everyone is signed in and has their raffle tickets. Make sure food is there, keep the carnivores away from the vegetarians food and deal with people who "couldn't use paypal"
After lunch, it's just a matter of not crashing before the raffle
I mean, it'd be nice to push higher resolution out for presentations but until manufacturers standardize on something better than VGA, it's .. HA, just realized that "VGA is LCD" is lowest common denominator and not liquid crystal display
That's a generalization, btw. There are some pretty fantastic stories folks with Thinkpads have about incompatibility with just about every projector on earth - but still it's not something you can know until you show up and plug it in.
@swasheck yeah I've been there. At SQL Sat Boston the speaker before me couldn't use presenter view and had tech support in the room 3 or 4 times before he even got a picture on the wall. Mine plugged in and worked immediately, but the projector literally exploded about half way through my talk.
I try to think about how I'd give my talks if I couldn't actually display the laptop. I think some of my talks would be manageable but some of the code heavy ones... not so much
@swasheck all you can really do is (a) have a VGA adapter, always and (b) test your slides and demos in the lowest resolution possible, because some projectors won't work until you go 1024x768 or something similarly horrible
@PaulWhite I don't even want to think about what international issues surely go along with all of that (got my 220 to 110 step down with a swiss army knife of connectors, check)
My HS friends were from mmarie's current neighborhood although at that time it was mostly mexicans and italians so I'm somewhat versed in the vulgarities of their languages
I need to get a handle on swearing in Hindi for my next linguistic feat
I worked with a guy from the Punjab region and worked really hard at trying to say the traditional greeting. He was very kind and said I did well. Learned that the local Indian place also has people from the same province so I tried it out on the kids (literally) working there
10 year old laughed me into my place. "NOoooo, that's not how you say that at all!"
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I don't believe it does. I wrote the MDX query to get the data, now I have to figure out how to do the same thing in our model
Honestly, I'm not really sure. None of us on the team have done this stuff before, so it's all foreign. I need to incorporate a Top 10 Customers to our model so our users can splice the data as needed. I'm just kinda muddling through it
I am trying to use sp_publication_validation stored procedure to validate that my replication setup is working correctly. This procedure is pretty straightforward and is described here.
I am running this command:
EXEC sp_publication_validation @publication = 'MyPublication'
,@rowcount_only...
@bluefeet lots of great whitepapers on Tabular http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn393915.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127437.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj735264.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj874401.aspx
There are two kinds of people. People who take to DAX and swim right off the bat. Usually people who are business users and it's their first language. Then there are programmers who sink like a rock.
I am rather new to this.
On my development server, I have 3 views that get live data from another database on a private internal server. Sample structure:
DevDB
--> Tables
--> Views
--> dbo.Customers
--> Stored Procedures
On my production server, those same views are set up as...
I apologize in advance in case this question has been asked already.
I'm working on revamping a reporting application used within my company. The requirements are:
Support addition of new fields (done through web app) and allow users to select those fields when building reports. Currently ther...
RTFM or Google does the trick: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb500435.aspx
I am trying to use sp_publication_validation stored procedure to validate that my replication setup is working correctly. This procedure is pretty straightforward and is described here.
I am running this command:
EXEC sp_publication_validation @publication = 'MyPublication'
,@rowcount_only...
I am rather new to this.
On my development server, I have 3 views that get live data from another database on a private internal server. Sample structure:
DevDB
--> Tables
--> Views
--> dbo.Customers
--> Stored Procedures
On my production server, those same views are set up as...
