The Heap™ – Consultancy ©® - 2014-12-03 (page 1 of 2)

Paul White

4:11 AM

@billinkc Sure thing. Phone me from the airport - I'll let you know the exact address ;-)

Andriy M

9:59 AM

How many editors does it now take to turn a post into a CW (if it's a question, in particular)?

I seem to remember there has been some discussion about whether that should be changed, and previously it was five?

ypercube

10:14 AM

@AndriyM No idea. read:

Blog - Stack Exchange: The Future of Community Wiki

Grace Note on August 19, 2011

When you mark a post community wiki on a Stack Exchange site, that means …

this post can be edited by anyone with 100 reputation

this post does not generate any reputation for anyone when upvoted or downvoted

The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — was nerfed when we introduced suggested edits. With suggested edits, anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.

This leaves many wondering — what’s the point of Community Wiki? …

It says:

> We removed the ability for users to make a question community wiki, but left the ability for users to make an answer wiki.

Andriy M

@ypercube It's a rather old post, I think CW triggers were still in place after that time. But I've now found this:

521

Q: What are "Community Wiki" posts?

Some questions and answers are marked Community Wiki and are owned by a Community Wiki user. Why have Community Wiki posts? How do Community Wiki posts work? How does a post become a Community Wiki post? How can the Community Wiki status be removed from a post? Return to FAQ Index

And the answer to my question seems be this particular revision of the answer

In short, there are no triggers now.

ypercube

Yes, I was reading that.

> An answer posted to a community wiki question will also be community wiki. In the past, questions could be made community wiki by their authors or by certain automatic triggers but now the only means is by a moderator converting it to community wiki. When a moderator converts a question to community wiki, all existing answers will also be converted in addition to converting future answers.

So either a mod for questions or the answerer for answers can do it.

JNK

1:18 PM

morning folks

Lamak

morning everyone

damn, the timing

JNK

:)

bluefeet

morning

Lamak

@JNK you are always one step ahead

JNK

@Lamak It's the timezone difference!

I think I'm like 2-3 hours ahead of Chile

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

3:38 PM

@Phil - do you need to rendezvous before drinkies on Friday?

billinkc

3:55 PM

"Can you help me with change detection?" Sure... give them a fully working demo, computes md5 hashsums to compare all the columns at once versus their current approach. Provide the TSQL to do the same. Sit down and walk them through it, provide the actual code they need for their current thing and... of course, they're not going to use it.

Time to retreat to my "it pays well" mantra

swasheck

you will have a merry christmas

billinkc

I have no idea who those people are but feel certain they will haunt my nightmares from now on

Andriy M

looks more like "you shall..." to me

swasheck

true

billinkc

He's got the I'm constipated look. She has the your dieing screams feed my soul look about her

swasheck

4:00 PM

@billinkc the blairmeister?

billinkc

Is that TB?

ypercube

Looks like him.

bluefeet

that smile is painful

swasheck

@billinkc yes it is.

finally took the chillins to see Big Hero 6.

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

@billinkc He used to be prime minister of the UK.

billinkc

4:11 PM

It's funny, the amount of news I've read or watched on TV approaches zero. However, the amount of news I listen to is quite high

ypercube

People vote on reputation sometimes. Example:

-3

Q: select top 5 records for each group in sql

This my table and this is my query select CellId, PathId, channel, sum(Duration) as min_duration from HourlySummary group by CellId, PathId, Channel order by cellid, pathid, sum(Duration) desc in my table i have 50+ cellid and each cellid have four pathid(i.e, 0,1,2,3) Now i want to di...

sql-server

Tim's answer is not correct (I think), yet he has 4 votes while the Romanian guy's answer has 1.

billinkc

And since I listen to weird internet stations and NPR, I like to think I get a decent world view. So, I know who Tony Blair is, just no idea what he looks like

The answer seems to be, a prat

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

@billinkc Yes, he does look like a prat.

billinkc

Maybe if GW was snuggled up to him, it'd have been a better photo

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

@billinkc Certainly couldn't have made it any worse.

ypercube

4:14 PM

Hey, we have the patent on prat prime ministers.

Lamak

@ypercube well, his answer wasn't correct till you pointed there was a problem

billinkc

I suppose GW would be the big spoon to TB's little spoon

ypercube

Is TB Greek?

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

@ypercube Don't know. You're welcome to have him if you want.

bluefeet

@JNK are you around?

ypercube

4:15 PM

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells He could compete with our current and previous PMs just fine.

@Lamak You mean Radu's? True. But I doubt that was the reason it was on 0 before.

Both answers have rather complicated OVER() clauses.

Lamak

@ypercube yeah, they are not the same (even if Radu seems to think so)

JNK

@bluefeet yes

Just got off a conference call

bluefeet

@JNK so this was also posted on SO. Both have answers, I tried to migrate but it was rejected immediately due to q-ban.

JNK

oh wonderful

bluefeet

Typically, we'd migrated & merge - do you just want to leave them in both places

they are now q-banned on SO as well so you can't migrate it either

ypercube

4:22 PM

The SO has been closed as duplicated.

JNK

i just closed it as a dupe

yeah that's fine too

I may delete it honestly

bluefeet

ok

bad user

JNK

I mean that's something to get Q banned with 2 Qs

bluefeet

bad questions, get you banned quickly

JNK

do blocks on other sites factor in? I thought I read something about that

ypercube

4:24 PM

both cross-posted, ill-formatted and badly explained.

bluefeet

@JNK I'm not sure.

swasheck

money.cnn.com/2014/12/03/technology/microsoft-clip-art/…

billinkc

npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/12/02/368060012/…

Aaron Bertrand

@swasheck OH NOES!!!

swasheck

> I had never thought "clip art" was created by an "artist." Nevertheless, thank you, Ms. Belleville for helping me get an "A" on my 7th grade science paper in 1999. :)

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

5:11 PM

@swasheck That makes me feel very old.

swasheck

it's not a feeling

2

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

@swasheck Get off my lawn

Zane

5:37 PM

@swasheck how will 4th graders add filler to their presentations?!

Michel

Hi @gbn just a small question about an answer you made (but I accept others to comment about it as well).

First of all... Good afternoon everyone ^.^

Count(*) and Count(1) were the same, but I didn't get the last part "That is, the ANSI standard recognises it as bleeding obvious what you mean. COUNT(1) has been optimised out by RDBMS vendors because of this superstition. Otherwise it would be evaluated as per ANSI"

NOW Count(1) is faster than Count(*) ?

JNK

It's the same

The 1 is optimized out to be *

Count(scalar or *) will return the number of rows period

swasheck

5:54 PM

@MikeFal hey --- you around?

Mike Fal

@swasheck For a bit, what's up?

Aaron Bertrand

@Michel no, "optimized out" <> "more optimized"

swasheck

@MikeFal would you/kassay be willing to share the work he did on the XE parsing of workloads? specifically, i recall him doing weird voodoo with a query hash so that he didnt have to add a sql_text action (or did i just mishear him at the bar?)

Lamak

@Michel nope

Paul White

Useless fact: Actually count(*) is parsed & optimized as count(0 [of type integer]) though post-optimization copy-out rewrites count(deterministic constant) as the built-in countstar aggregate.

Lamak

5:56 PM

they are the same

Aaron Bertrand

It doesn't really matter what's in there except in the case where you name a nullable column.

There are very few cases where you actually need COUNT() anyway, IMHO. sqlperformance.com/2014/10/t-sql-queries/…

swasheck

@PaulWhite i've read this 3 times. i only understand this portion: Actually count(*) is parsed & optimized as count(0 [of type integer])

3

Mike Fal

@swasheck I'm sure he would, but lemme ask quickly.

Paul White

Well you can hurt performance a little by always writing COUNT(@@SPID) or something like that, but goodness only knows why you would do that.

Aaron Bertrand

@PaulWhite yes, true, there are some wacky things you could do there

Paul White

5:58 PM

@swasheck "it ends up as count(*) unless you do something truly dumb"

Aaron Bertrand

But among the common and sensible alternatives...

billinkc

@PaulWhite Is that a challenge?

Paul White

I never let good sense or practicality get in the way of making a useless geeky point :)

billinkc

Let me go see what SO can scrounge up

Paul White

Someone is bound to use COUNT(NEWID()) on SO.

Tim Stone

6:00 PM

@PaulWhite Whew

Paul White

So SO search is broken, what's new :-D

Tim Stone

Zing!

Paul White

Goodness me that man lurks like a pro!

Yes sorry that was the cheapest of cheap shots :)

billinkc

Thus far, my bingle searches for COUNT(NEWID()) have yielded no results

Paul White

Looks like I Was Wrong™.

billinkc

6:04 PM

Never bet against dumb

infinite monkeys and typewriters and all that

and now to dig into this webinar

Michel

thanks @AaronBertrand @Lamak and everyone else. Nice to see that it made a small but funny to read discussion =D

^.^

Andriy M

"Funny" is quite an understatement. I now wonder if there can be a limit to the number of messages in a row here each of which makes me giggle.

Michel

@AndriyM amazing* is better for the situation?

Paul White

My chat window has stopped auto-scrolling. This is annoying. I should rant on Meta.

Or just refresh :-$

Ooo! Searching for NEWID, we missed the second answer on the same question!

COUNT(SYS_GUID())

swasheck

dbcc traceon(3604);

select count(newid())
from sys.all_columns
option (recompile, querytraceon 8605);

select count(*)
from sys.all_columns
option (recompile, querytraceon 8605);

(or is that too trivial?)

the trees are definitely different

ish

Paul White

6:18 PM

It's easier to look in the execution plan - Stream Aggregate properties, but yes 8605 will show the count(0).

Using a real table with lots of rows will make it easier than parsing the whole tree for the system 'table' (actually a view).

Andriy M

@Michel "Hilarious" is closer to what I had in mind, but I agree that it was amazing as well. :)

Zane

@billinkc Can an infinite amount of monkeys on and infinite amount of typewriters write a coherent SO question?

Paul White

Look for ScaOp_Intrinsic newid versus ScaOp_Const TI(int,ML=4) XVAR(int,Not Owned,Value=0)

swasheck

that's where i noticed the first difference

Paul White

That's pretty much all there is to see without a debugger.

Which leaves you in the admittedly unsatisfactory position of taking my word for it ;-)

swasheck

6:23 PM

some peoples' words are more satisfactory than others'

Aaron Bertrand

@Zane I think we've already proven how rare that is

Zane

@AaronBertrand do you think the monkeys would beat the actual SO users?

Paul White

@swasheck Extra credit for getting the apostrophes right.

Aaron Bertrand

@Zane Oh I didn't realize those were distinct sets

2

Paul White

@Zane Yes, with sticks.

Zane

6:27 PM

@AaronBertrand touche.

Marian

@PaulWhite btw, taking your word will do :).

Paul White

@Marian Thanks!

Marian

I'm actively chasing my wife and boss to allow me to visit your Lisbon precon :)

swasheck

@Marian you disambiguated my statement. you're like my own personal System.Reflection friend

Paul White

@Marian For the time away from work/home?

Marian

6:31 PM

@PaulWhite both are important; I have a team to support at work, and the wife at home... I'll probably have to pay huge interest for both sides :).

@swasheck I'm sorry, but yes, I regard you as my better brother here on the Heap

@swasheck you and the @Lamork character, but he's to far away to kick my ass :)

swasheck

@Marian better at being ignorant, that's for sure

Paul White

@Marian I wonder if SQL Saturdays would be better off running post-event training days (so, on the Sunday rather than the Friday). Then you'd only have one set of interest to pay, perhaps.

Marian

@PaulWhite well it's a full day - your precon, and a full day for the usual conference. We actively need both days.

Aaron Bertrand

For some people Sunday would be better. For most, I expect, taking some from work and some from home is better than taking all from home.

Marian

It's a long flight anyway for us. Portugal is the other end of Europe..seeing from my end :).

Paul White

6:36 PM

@AaronBertrand That's true I guess.

@Marian You have my sympathy! LOL

Aaron Bertrand

Yeah but Europe is like the size of Texas so any complaints about distance go to /dev/null

Marian

@AaronBertrand I'm used to 8-10 h drives.. not flights. I get bored in planes.

Aaron Bertrand

I get bored in plains and planes

Marian

truth

Paul White

@Marian Wow I had no idea the flight would be so long.

I honestly expected IAS-LIS to be 3 hours or less.

Gonsalu

6:40 PM

@AaronBertrand Not exactly the same size imgur.com/GgjdNZg hehe

Andriy M

@AaronBertrand Not to mention plain planes, I guess.

Gonsalu

mapfrappe.com is really cool to compare areas on different parts of the world

2

Aaron Bertrand

@Gonsalu yeah, I know

Marian

@PaulWhite I exaggerated, don't worry. Maybe I get free sympathy :).

Paul White

The Heap is very educational this morning.

Gonsalu

6:41 PM

@AaronBertrand it was more an opportunity to mention mapfrappe, I know you weren't being literal :-)

Paul White

@Marian No I just looked and 8h 35m was the quickest.

Gonsalu

@PaulWhite going a back to the COUNT() thing, I'm under the impression that COUNT(*) is not quite the same as COUNT(1) because COUNT(*) would fail when you don't have permissions to read all the columns of a table

Is my understanding correct? I would test it, but I don't have access to a SQL Server instance right now

JNK

@Gonsalu I don't think it expands * to all columns in this case

Aaron Bertrand

Justin Forsett's mortgage is less than one of mine, never mind both

baltimoreravens.com/news/article-1/…

Marian

@PaulWhite lol, didn't even cross my mind, now it gets painfully interesting, for real.

Paul White

6:45 PM

@Gonsalu I think you're thinking of EXISTS?

Sorry I was away playing with mapfrappe