The Heap™ – Consultancy ©®

mustaccio

12:36 AM

You'll probably need to post your "Morning"s for the whole week in advance to keep up with the communicativeness

Josh Darnell

2:32 AM

@PaulWhite They should be fixed now 😀

Although I think it's not that they stopped working - more that they were never set up to begin with 😅

Paul White

@JoshDarnell oh great thanks

Zikato

6:52 AM

Morning

McNets

7:16 AM

Morning

Vérace - Слава Україні

8:40 AM

A chairde - Morning all!

John K. N.

9:01 AM

Morning

Paul White

11:55 AM

@JoshDarnell That said, the card validator still has problems with Erik's site. Seems more about reachability than card validation so probably a separate issue. Still.

> ERROR: Failed to fetch page due to: HttpConnectionTimeout

Erik Darling

paul stop ddosing my site

Paul White

One bloke in his NZ living room is a distributed attack? 😀

Erik Darling

who knows how many of my laptops you're doing this from

Paul White

Well that's true I suppose

Still it seems the web was a mistake

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite I think that might be a transient issue - the card validator worked on it yesterday.

Paul White

12:01 PM

Oh I'll stop worrying about it then. Cheers.

Well I might worry just a little bit on general principle.

Josh Darnell

That's reasonable.

Paul White

Like Erik's rates

Erik Darling

hey they're so reasonable they haven't budged once during all this inflation hoo-ha

Paul White

12:17 PM

Erik doesn't drive

Mind you, neither does Josh. He runs everywhere

Erik Darling

some nurses on tik tok told me high gas prices are good so whatever

Paul White

that tracks

tik tok nurses are one of the few remaining reliable news services

Erik Darling

it's too early to scare me like that

Paul White

yikes

Paul White

12:42 PM

Meanwhile, I see:

Obvious clickbait

Josh Darnell

I saw "Erection" trending. And while I was watching the sidebar, that entry changed to "JavaScript." I'm not sure how to interpret that.

Erik Darling

they're edging you

Josh Darnell

1:01 PM

🤣

Paul White

Does make sense though.

No quicker way to get rid of erection.

I suppose that's what you meant.

Takes me a moment to translate American sometimes.

Josh Darnell

1:49 PM

@PaulWhite Haha that's a solid explanation.

Paul White

solid eh

👀

Josh Darnell

I mean not anymore.

Because of all the JavaScript.

TypeScript would have been a different story.

Anyway.

> This feels like a bug fix for implied nullability problems

Zikato

Was it really trending? Sounds like a fad

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite What are implied nullability problems?

Paul White

@JoshDarnell Times when the optimizer assumes something can't be NULL when it might be

There's an example linked in the question

2

Q: Why does a merge into a temporal table with a nonclustered index in the history table throw an error

I get the following error when I try to merge under a few conditions. Is someone able to explain why? Seems like it's a problem with SQL Server itself, but I wanted to post it here to confirm. Attempting to set a non-NULL-able column's value to NULL. The target table must be versioned The hist...

Many such cases over the years

Especially with MERGE

Zikato

1:57 PM

I've tried to get the MERGE ban into our coding standards - unsuccessfully.
The argument was, that it's a standard SQL statement, so why ban it?
Well, so is UDF and we have banned that

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite Ah, thank you! I'll admit that I read your answer more carefully than the question.

Paul White

@JoshDarnell There are several KBs with examples. Here's an older one: support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/…

Josh Darnell

@Zikato I remember talking to some folks about that at my last job. The argument I got there was "we have been using it for years and never had any problems."

Zikato

@JoshDarnell A tale old as time. There isn't a problem until there is one.

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite Wow! That is old.

Paul White

2:00 PM

It's a fundamentally tricky issue.

NULLs were a mistake.

Josh Darnell

The explanation in that KB is so great, and that makes me a little sad.

Paul White

We don't get explanations like that any more.

MS fired all their tech writers on the basis the community would step in.

Unfortunately, the community is 99% know-nothing wastrels.

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite We'd be lucky to get what's in the title if that KB were written today 😁

Paul White

Right!

John K. N.

😂

slips back to expdp-ing an Oracle Database instance

Paul White

2:04 PM

All that said, I don't mind MERGE bugs like the one in that question.

If you combine enough complex features in one query you're always going to be exploring the edges of their testing matrix.

So I'm just going to write this MERGE, that's really just an INSERT, on a temporal table with a secondary index on the history table, and return the inserted data into a table variable using the OUTPUT clause. What could go wrong.

@JohnK.N. Too much conversation for you I guess 😀

21 hours ago, by John K. N.

<your favourite mild expletive>, we are a communicative bunch in here.

John K. N.

No, no. Please do carry on.

Paul White

Regexes are worse than javascript

John K. N.

^DATAFILE\s\R(.*){1,}\RLOGGING

Search for `^DATAFILE(\s+'E\:'.*){1,}\sLOGGING$`
Replace with:
`DATAFILE
'\+DATA' SIZE 1G AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 1G
LOGGING`

Josh Darnell

@PaulWhite True.

Paul White

@Zikato I just want to say I did appreciate your semicolon placement

The lack of semicolons elsewhere in your post was a high price to pay though

Zikato

2:14 PM

heh, can't please everybody. I try to keep it on my mind but habits die hard

Paul White

straightforwardsql.com/posts/scary-scalar-functions-parallelism for context

SQL Prompt has this neat feature where it will insert all the missing statement terminators in an entire script

John K. N.

Found a good site to test Regexes: regex101.com

Paul White

I try to terminate all my statements, but it usually finds one or two I missed

@JohnK.N. There are no good places to use or test regexes

Zikato

@john

John K. N.

Well not in SQL Server that's for sure.

Zikato

2:17 PM

sorry.
@JohnK.N. that's my favourite. If you have any interesting Regex problem, feel free to send it my way

Paul White

Not in this universe or any other

Verace loves regexes and he's wrong about literally everything

I rest my case

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite they belong in the 7th level of Dante's Inferno

Paul White

Seems like we have a moderator consensus

And everyone knows how wise we are

Hannah Vernon

I'm particularly fond of using RegEx in SSMS because it is just so profoundly wonderful to move commas to the front of each line, where God intended them to be.

@PaulWhite ^^^ well so much for that wise bit, eh?

Paul White

A brief moment of harmony shattered

Zikato

2:24 PM

@HannahVernon hear, hear

I hate that the mention completion doesn't work with Enter. I usually use tab, but I think JIRA taught me to use Enter instead

Hannah Vernon

@Zikato although Holy Wars have been started over less.

@Zikato Stack Chat is its own beast in many ways

McNets

@HannahVernon don't you use any code formatter?

Paul White

.Everyone knows where punctuation belongs

Hannah Vernon

@McNets no... I'm old skool. I write web pages in notepad, and T-SQL by hand.

Paul White

@Zikato You know you can edit messages using up-arrow?

Hannah Vernon

2:26 PM

@PaulWhite !Precisely

McNets

@HannahVernon is there another way to write web pages?

Hannah Vernon

clearly not

Paul White

I wonder what a JIRA is

Zikato

@PaulWhite I do know that now. It only works for the last one though.
I can't delete my shame

Hannah Vernon

returning to RegEx for just a moment; they're not all that terribly difficult to write, but trying to determine what one does after the fact is a fools errand. Even trying to understand what a specific regex does while you're writing it can be a feat.

Paul White

2:29 PM

@Zikato You can pay me back by terminating your statements and putting commas at the end of the line,

Hannah Vernon

Paul, do you use source control for T-SQL at all?

Paul White

@HannahVernon No, but I have no need

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite I fixed it for you

Zikato

@PaulWhite that's a price I cannot pay

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite yah, I figured

Paul White

2:30 PM

@HannahVernon thanks

@Zikato and yet you seem to want to continue to chat here

Zikato

I like regex because you can optimize it as well.

Paul White

regex is a good way to add bugs

all regexes contain bugs

Zikato

any tool can be misused;

Paul White

better

fundamentally though, strings were a mistake

Zikato

Paul White

2:34 PM

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

drops mic

/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.

The tooltips are worthwhile

Zikato

I had fun with this. More challenge than sudoku;
https://regexcrossword.com/challenges/intermediate/puzzles/1

Hannah Vernon

your definition of fun, and my definition of fun are apparently quite different

Zikato

@HannahVernon I write my regexes in the regex101 site and save them with a list of test cases. Sort of like build-in unit tests

Hannah Vernon

@Zikato ok wow, that's next level. I paste them into notepad and promptly completely forget what they do.

the upside is that I'm getting fairly good at constructing them on the fly

Paul White

I had a girlfriend once whose previous partner was named Reg

That's my closest experience with a regex

Hannah Vernon

2:49 PM

hah

Paul White

I intend to keep it that way

regex is a gateway drug to becoming a programmer

and no one wants that

Hannah Vernon

holy cow man you reverse engineer stuff all the time

Paul White

in true database administration tradition

Hannah Vernon

pretty sure you're a programmer

Paul White

YOU TAKE THAT BACK

HOW VERY DARE YOU, SIR

Hannah Vernon

2:52 PM

lol

Zikato

if @PaulWhite doesn't consider himself programmer, how can anyone else?;

Paul White

supersets do exist, that's all I'll say

Hannah 'programs' in VB

Hannah Vernon

ok, now that's just rude lol. I used to program in VB

Zikato

VB still exists?

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite ok, you're a 10x programmer

Paul White

2:54 PM

@HannahVernon well you started it

I do have more than ten exes it's true

@Zikato it was vb.net

like that adds credibility

the language literally has Dim as a keyword and BASIC right in the name

so Rosie has no sense of humour then

Zikato

Yeah, in a previous life I wrote some Outlook and Excel snippets in VBA to automate some tasks;

Paul White

The A stood for Amateur right?

Hannah Vernon

I'll have you know I wrote an entire distributed N-Tier system in Access for the front-end, SQL Server for the backend, and Windows Services in VB.Net.

Zikato

@PaulWhite Only in my case

Paul White

@HannahVernon Did it work at all

Hannah Vernon

2:58 PM

no

Paul White

🤣

Hannah Vernon

I mean it did eventually get me fired, which was a positive.

funnily enough it didn't seem that way at first though

Paul White

everything happens for a reason

except regexes

why do people think putting a bounty on a terrible question will rescue it?

Hannah Vernon

money solves everything, even fake internet money

Paul White

seems

Lamak

3:15 PM

@HannahVernon why are you throwing shade to cryptos?

Hannah Vernon

@Lamak NFTs and alt-coins are a plague on humanity.

₿ is the one true coin.

Erik Darling

Money solves half of life’s problems

Hannah Vernon

but anyway, this isn't Bitcoin

Paul White

certainly helping to keep the planet warm

Erik Darling

For example, I used to be dumb and poor

McNets

3:19 PM

@ErikDarling and now?

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite hey it's winter, you should be glad, no?

Paul White

@HannahVernon I am a believer in four seasons. These days we get one, maybe two proper Winters days a year

ypercubeᵀᴹ

@HannahVernon I'm utterly confused now

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite move to Canada, we'd love to have you, and for sure you'd get to see actual winter

Paul White

You only get one season though

Hannah Vernon

3:21 PM

no, two. Winter, and potholes/mosquitoes

Paul White

You don't work in Sales do you

Hannah Vernon

hah no

Paul White

@McNets He's not poor now

Or at least only in the way all Americans are

Hannah Vernon

@PaulWhite Canadians are a self deprecating bunch. It's why we have one of the lowest population densities of the entire world.

McNets

the lack of sex could be another factor

Paul White

3:24 PM

You all should move somewhere smaller

McNets

joking

Paul White

@McNets You'd think there'd be bugger all else to do

Hannah Vernon

seems like we decided to get the band back together, in Blues Brothers parlance. Most of the core crew seems to be here.

Blues Brothers Putting the Band Back Together

►

Paul White

I'll believe when Kermit chimes in

Hannah Vernon

oh wow Kermit

Paul White

3:27 PM

the Fresh Prince himself

I wonder if he's still fresh

after all this time

Hannah Vernon

dank perhaps, being a frog he's probably a bit marshy.

Paul White

pets don't live forever, sadly

life lessions

McNets

Only 0.34% of programmers has been coding for more than 50 years

survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#overview

Paul White

and they still can't get regexes to work

McNets

😂😂😂😂

Yes, but javascript still the first survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/…

Paul White

3:44 PM

Twitter is broken

I like regex more than Beyonce

McNets

3:58 PM

Paul White

🦆

Zikato

@PaulWhite I can live with that;

John K. N.

4:20 PM

@Zikato my hero

mustaccio

4:34 PM

@PaulWhite Then we'll have to deprecate some more of us

Josh Darnell

The Twitter card validator is magically working again on Erik's blog posts.

Perhaps someone fixed it with RegEx.

James Lupolt

Hello

jcolebrand

5:42 PM

@mustaccio wrong way to go on this? dba.stackexchange.com/questions/313649/… He flagged with "what? why?" more or less. This is the part about SE that I'm not as happy with. He's still got a legitimate desire to understand the thing, but I agree, it doesn't fit the format.

I'm sure Paul will be happy to just nuke my comments :p

mustaccio

I agree with you -- "too broad", and your advice to the OP is good.