Can someone review and reapply my edit to this post? The OP rejected my edit: dba.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/73394

@nhahtdh It was a good edit, but it's not worth getting into a dispute about. There are plenty of other questions and answers that could use a good edit. I suggest you shrug and move on.

:D

 Caller: Hello Mrs Smith, this is the head from your sons school ... Did you really call your son "Jonny ;DROP Table [Students] --Smith"?
Mrs Smith: Yes we did, little Jonny Tables we like to call him!
Caller: well I hope you're satisfied, we have lost all our student data for this year.
Mrs Smith: Well it seems Little Jonny taught you a lesson too then about sanitising your data input, so proud of our boy!

@Darth_Wardy Is Little Johnny a cousin of Little Bobby Tables?

@ypercubeᵀᴹ yup :) I'm guessing you've heard that one too then :)

people just don't learn

Half tempted to change my own name by depol to Paul ;DROP Table [Address] --Ward

This is of course part of my reason for using an ORM ... this kind of thing can't happen and I don't have to worry about it

Did you guys see the announcement of .Net Core 1.0 and EF Core 1.0 from M$ yesterday?

Hopefully the newer lightweight version of EF will be a bit "tidier"

@Darth_Wardy ORM ... Urgh

awww guys ... where's the love gone ... did it stay in the EU when we voted out?

@Darth_Wardy Let's just say @Phil's been involved in cleaning up the mess after Hibernate.

Mathematics in a public place? He should be locked up.

There were some similar stories around 9/11. I guess acting excited while reading or writing something arcane makes you seem dangerously insane to normal people.

@JamesLupolt When I first came here they had some sort of scare - IIRC it was just after the train in Madrid got bombed. Just leaving my bag on a chair while I stretched my legs in the reception of a prominent hedge fund was enough to get some strange looks.

@Darth_Wardy there was never any love for ORM/EF

hello people

@swasheck brutal ... how do you guys handle your application to db comms?

hand cranking SQL is so 1990

I think only about 1/20 of the developers I work with has a favorable opinion of EF. Most are using stored procedures or a partial ORM such as Dapper.

@Darth_Wardy I did an application last year that used a sproc layer for the database, although it used EF on top of that.

Having said that, many of the core database interactions were quite complex, and the architecture was heavily data driven for configurability.

@Darth_Wardy why isn't coding in whichever other language is not 1990s?

especially when you compare mildly complex queries written by a human and an ORM, both aesthetically and performance-wise

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells wow ... total architecture overkill for no benefit ... no wonder people complain about EF so much if that's how they are using it

of course, if you do only SELECT blah FROM bleh WHERE id = 2, ORMs might be a good choice

@dezso performance wise since using EF 6 I haven't found any scenarios where EF generates worse SQL than a human would write ... assuming like for like when translating the LINQ statements in question

@Darth_Wardy What makes you say it has no benefit?

@dezso I have a table that I NEVER query with less than 500 lines of SQL ... all custom queries, sod trying to hand crank that lot

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I profiled it to check

@Darth_Wardy so you can tweak EF to write an anti join in any of the 3-4 (more?) ways it is possible?

@dezso Several times I've seen complex ORM-generated queries with layers of nested expressions that on close inspection actually reduce to SELECT columns FROM table WHERE condition

@dezso I can tweak the LINQ statement to get the desired result as fast as the equivelent SQL I would write yes ... what's an anti join?

Sounds a lot like the 'plural of anecdote is evidence' argument: 'It works for me.'

meh what do i know ... not like i do anything heavy with it ...

There's more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying goes. Martin Fowler has an interesting take on this.

martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog

Moved a billion euro's around in the week leading up to new year though ... that was cool :)

@JamesLupolt that I haven't seen yet (outside of DBA.SE), but the other side of it are the queries which after tweaking some minor or major details, have the same result set and very different query plans

some of these plans might even be better than the original :D

@Darth_Wardy In my last but one gig I closed £4B worth of commercial insurance business every month using SQL.

@JamesLupolt badly written linq will evaluate like that, or to a shit projection

</topper>

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells that's cool ... we aren't far off that now

just this month took on 3 major new deals too

@Darth_Wardy So, would you say that in order to use Linq correctly you need to understand the underlying SQL that it will generate?

when implemented they could be huge money

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells yup, understand ... not write

Good morning, Heap. Nice d**k measuring contest we are having this morning.

lol

@Darth_Wardy And so now in order to troubleshoot this you now need to understand the mechanics of two complex systems.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells yeh ... your DB engine and your Business domain ... no shit!

when is that ever not the case?

@Darth_Wardy And in the case of Linq you also need to understand how the O/R mapper works as well.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Given that as a developer I must understand linq and SQL, both required from the Data and Business Domain requirements, why is it so hard to expect a developer to understand how the 2 layers talk to each other?

Oh no ... developer needs knowledge to do his job ... big issue that!!

hardly ground breaking though

Where did you learn the SQL if the ORM means you never needed to use it?

Just because I don't want to write SQL does not mean I don't have to know it

So where did you learn it?

Just by reading the output of EF?

I learnt it when I learnt everything else I nkow in dev

Have you never built an application that used explicit SQL queries?

its like when you learn to do math, first you learn how to add numbers then you learn how to multiply them

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells yes I have but not for some time because I use an ORM

And you would say that an ORM is a universally superior paradigm for application development?

when did I say that?

@Darth_Wardy | hand cranking SQL is so 1990

Sort of implies a view that it's been replaced by something better.

If you really want to see the application-database line blurred, try building an application with Smalltalk and an OODBMS like GemStone.

gemtalksystems.com

Smalltalk is truly a joy to work with. If you've never used it then it's worth trying just for the sheer in-our-face OO-ness of the platform.

Unfortunately, it's a bit of an also-ran.

maybe i'm alone (unlikely) but I have applications that depend on thousands of lines of SQL that's dynamically generated on a per query basis defined very loosely by a complex Business Domain sat on top of it ... writing SQL queries to handle each of those queries would be a full time job if I removed my ORM ... for me it makes more sense to throw in an ORM and a dynamic API that build those complex queries than it does to hand crank SQL

There are plenty of folks running mission critical systems built on stored procedures as well.

However, you've done a fairly good job of establishing that an ORM has done a good job of meeting your requirements.

<--- big fan of using the right tool for the job

despite being a developer I tend to write the least amount of code possible

And started extolling their virtues in a forum habituated by DBAs that have to spend a significant amount of time troubleshooting issues in queries generated by ORMs.

Really ??? jeez ... those DBA's are being crapped on ... I debug my own queries

I would never impose my crappy written linq query on a DBA to fix

The tooling devs have is definitely good enough to warrant some exploration on their own without bugging a DBA who should be concerned by other things ... like keeping the SQL instance running and fast

IMO

could be wrong

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells if that's you ... sorry man ... i feel your pain when I get a BA give me a 1 liner as a requirement for an application

bbc.com/news/technology-36650848

it's a joke of an industry at times

@swasheck did you watch the chile - argentina match?

@Darth_Wardy I'm sure you're a wonderful programmer but you just argued that your code is so great it never has issues in production.

@Darth_Wardy and yet, if one knows what they're doing, it's still the best data access method because when you hand-crank the code, you also have to begin (or continue) to learn your data. what worked for them may not work for you.

@Lamak the hockey match? sure did. congrats!

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells No i argued that my production problems are exactly that ... mine not some poor DBA's

@swasheck I meant to ask, why hockey? (not that well versed on it)

@Darth_Wardy So you've got a pager if there is an outage in production?

@swasheck yeh and hexadecimal is still the best programming language by that logic

@Darth_Wardy Reductio ad absurdum.

@Lamak it was a very physical match. both sides should have been down to about 8 men :)

@swasheck Presumably the AI talked the human pilots into ejecting by falsely promising "lower immigration and cash money for the NHS".

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Well considering right now I'm responsible for our up time in all environments and only have a few juniors at my disposal ... yeh, I don't physically have a pager but I get the emails from the system when something goes down.

@swasheck nah, not that much. But they did a number on Alexis ankle on the beggining of the match. Not even a foul for the ref

@Darth_Wardy So you've got a team doing production support as well as development?

@Darth_Wardy yeah. what @ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells ... at some point you have to argue for the efficiencies of having a higher-level language. having said that, the tradeoffs in the one-time creation of a complex stored procedure that runs faster over the hundreds of thousands of executions of a poorly-composed ORM-generated query are worth it to me. i'd rather spend 4 hours on a stored proc than constantly fielding complaints about how "the database is slow"

I guess it boils down to your criteria for "best" ... IMO that's defined as "Most fit for purpose given the current set of requirements"

@Darth_Wardy And you've just successfully argued that your ORM is a good fit for your requirements.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I run the dev team but am responsible for all environments, my whole team is not supporting production, it's basically me and the CTO

@Lamak yeah. he was odd. the yellow that messi was shown was a bad call. there were a few that were bad calls against the chilean side as well. someone got a yellow for a simple foul and i was pretty shocked.

@Lamak in the end, when it went to pens, i knew chile was going to win. and they earned it

i was glad that they won because they really did outplay argentina for most of the match

@Darth_Wardy So you're working in a small company where you are very close to production and have access to this environment to troubleshoot issues?

passing to messi when he's marked by 4-5 defenders and then blaming him is a stupid strategy. though toward the end he had a chance and was exhausted and it showed in a slow, horrible run through the midfield.

@swasheck yeah, they had no strategy

@Lamak it was pretty poor.

and once higuain missed his open net, you could see argentina think, "here we go again."

all the better for us, really

yup, that was a carbon copy

@swasheck Unfortunately that's not always possible, even the best defined Sproc can only handle so much before you need a second sproc, in my case I would need hundreds of these possibly thousands in some DB's ... better to have a bit of business logic based on data driven rules than to try and write thousands of sprocs (it's hard to explain without giving out details of the company's IP)

@Darth_Wardy sure. that's fine. if it works for you then great. it doesnt work in my environment and 99% of the EF queries i've seen have been howlers. if it works for you then all the better for you :)

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I do yes, but I have concerns about it as I am after all a developer / architect myself and don't think it's write for such a role to have any part in a production environment

@Lamak was watching the match with my kid. he still loves messi, but he shocked me by saying he was supporting chile. the reason: he went to a brazilian-style soccer camp last year and they played a "world cup" and his team of 3 was chile. so he supported chile :)

@swasheck wordy I would say is the best way to explain most of what EF generates in my situation but the wordyness is in effect no logically different to the hand cranked SQL in most situations

@Darth_Wardy OK, so we've now established that EF was a good fit for your requirements in a small, agile start-up, where their labour-saving properties in development were beneficial and you have some requirements to construct queries dynamically that EF is helpful for.

as with all technologies there are always ways to abuse it

@swasheck nice. Sorry we broke messi

@swasheck twitter.com/Alexis_Sanchez/status/747472116921020416/photo/1

In other words, 'It works for me.'

@swasheck kind of amazing that he decided to play for almost all the match

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells we may be a small company but we are connecting large multinational corporations together so our requirements are to serve that of many enterprises

basically a middleware system

@Lamak seeing that makes me respect him even more. he was clearly injured and he kept playing.

@Lamak i'm just proud of vidal for not getting hammered and crashing a sports car

but we do all the complex intercompany interactions that they can't do ensuring all the various international regulations are adhered to for the data (it's transactional data)

@Lamak AFA broke messi. you just delivered the coup de grâce

lol, we are too

@swasheck yeah. they are a mess

anyway ... i have no complaints about that match. the US Colombia match is a different story.

we couldnt/cant buy a call

@swasheck ah, yeah, I watch that one too

as i said, if fricking bobby wood could bury one of his 4 excellent chances, its a different conversation

yeah, sure lost a lot of chances

it was horrible. and klinsmann's substitution patterns (75th and 80th minute?? really??) are head-scratchers

well, yup, I didn't understand them either

@Lamak anyway. i'm sure chile is quite happy

that, we are

@Darth_Wardy If it's any consolation to you, around 2001-2003 I worked on a humongous J2EE project that used an ORM, and it worked fine - for the bits that it worked for. The system still has a pretty fair chunk of PL/SQL code in the arse end, though.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells always shudder when I see J2EE ... no thanks ... fair play to you though!!!

@Darth_Wardy Pre-Struts JSP. Not a pretty sight, but it worked well enough. Something like 200-300 staff-years to build and still in production as far as I'm aware.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells ouch!

I like to cite this project when folks make 'mine's bigger than yours' arguments. According to Sun it was the largest J2EE project in Australasia. Maybe it still is.

Several million LOC.

@ypercubeᵀᴹ are you here?

@Lamak I am now.

ah, hi :-)

I realized that I read something wrong, so, sorry for bothering you ;-)

@Lamak No problem.

Are there are any football games tonight in the American cup?

@ypercubeᵀᴹ no

it's done

copa america is done

Oh, congrats!

congrats @Lamak! heard u beat those ugly Easterners and caused Messi to say byebye :)

@Marian as @swasheck said, we are quite happy

@Lamak nothing to say but congratulations, wasn't aware that your team was that strong, but now I stand corrected

would happily search for a game summary

Anybody want to chat about SSAS a little bit? I need to add an attribute - and would like to talk thru this particular situation.

I inherited these cubes. But before I took this position the cubes were actually copied from our (newish) parent company over in Europe. Our cubes are very very similar but still slightly different. One user, also from europe, came to the US and brought over his previously built excel file that had been connected to the EU version of the cubes. In the USA, there is a specific attribute of a dimension that does not exist.

So, I was tasked with adding it back in. But what I've found is this particular attribute actually can be found on another dimension. This particular dimension is not used, but is indeed part of the data source view when I look in BIDS.

Is there a way to join the underlying tables to bring in this attribute to the dimension I need it on for the cube?

I think what I need is an "Attribute Relationship"

....seems pretty crucial to cubes in general - to which i am very new :)

@Marian thanks man

@Lamak Ya congrats

From the summaries I've seen it was deserved at least based on the tournament

@JzInqXc9Dg It's crucial to "dimensions", it creates a bitmap index so that the mdx query you send doesn't have to evaluate non-empty on the measures but can filter a lot out based on the bitmap index

e.g. "If I know the customer group I know what customers are in it, I don't need to evaluate every customer's measure to see if it'll be empty or not"

@TomV I'm gonna say that it was deserved, though I may be a tad biased

@Lamak It looked as if it was, but I only saw 10 minutes summaries and not even from half of the games

@JzInqXc9Dg but I don't interpret your description as attributes relations

@TomV we started slow, new coach. But the team got stronger each match

@Lamak Hope I'll be able to say the same in 2 weeks

I'm hoping for it too

though I'm also kind of rooting for iceland

@Lamak I was yesterday, but we won't meet them until the finals, so I'm still wishing them best of luck

for now

@TomV ah, that's nice

@Lamak I have a special fondness of Iceland having hosted some participants for the special olympics a few years back

Some of the Icelandic coaches/players stayed with us, they were really kind and down to earth people appreciating even the littlest of things

@TomV yup, they even offered free whale watching to english people

Actually living with 4 of them for a few weeks was a very pleasant experience. They left with lifetime invitations to stay over if I ever go there.

@TomV well - i have created a new relationship. then ive gone into the dimension i need to edit and done "show all related tables" and i am able to pull in the field i want. I think i will copy the AS database and open a new solution to try this in test environment to see if it gives what i want..

@JzInqXc9Dg Possibly but then you misinterpreted the term attribute relationships

ok - well i read that link. not following you though...

@TomV they sound nice

not saying youre wrong and i didn't misinterpret. but just not following you on how i might have

yes? im not following..

You need them, but they wouldn't have solved your problem as they can only be configured if the attribute is already in the dimension

i was saying that by first creating a relationship - i can then bring in my field from another (related, hence the relationship) dimension.

yay semantics

@JzInqXc9Dg I just wanted to help you understand the correct meaning of the term, so A) you read the link and learn about then and B) you are able to use the correct terms in google to help you in your future endeavors

but 'meh' I suppose

sure i understand

thank you

i did read the link

It's part of my own frustration sometimes, people asking about OLAP but not using correct terminology

@TomV Mine, too.

If you want to succeed learn to ask in attributes, members, measures etc not columns, values etc

And you can only learn by not dismissing them as "meh semantics"

@mmarie Yeah, people telling you an entire story with nonsense terminology and then looking like it's your fault for not understanding what they mean :)

@TomV sounds like a consultant's life

@TomV not dismissing AT ALL. i just couldn't tell if you were trying to explain something to help me solve my immediate problem or if you were dispelling wisdom onto me. i was just trying to filter the new info you were giving me at the time to "file" it appropriately in my head is all. :)

AND btw you were the one to say "meh" - i actually said "yay" ;) lol

@JzInqXc9Dg You're right

I keep typing and deleting. It seems I still have some filter today . :)

@mmarie I can relate

@swasheck Is there something awesome to do in Denver for July 4?

i'm going to the rapids game with my family

but otherwise i dont know. i'm not awesome