The Heap™ – Consultancy ©®

Michael Green

03:13

@swasheck What's your C# question?

swasheck

03:38

@MichaelGreen i got it... thanks though

Kris Gruttemeyer

12:35

Morning everyone

Lamak

morning

@bluefeet there are quite some good mod candidates

I could've sworn that Martijn was one already

ypercube

12:55

@Lamak two from the python community. Martijn and Jon Clements.

Lamak

true

@ypercube you don't want to nominate yourself?, I would vote for you

JNK

mornin

JNK

13:23

I would vote for @ypercube as well

ypercube

@Lamak run for SO mod? no way

I would rather be in a mental institute

(sorry blue ;)

JNK

SO is super slow today

Lamak

@ypercube those options are not exclusive

3

JNK

can anyone else load SO?

ypercube

it loads fine for me

Kris Gruttemeyer

13:25

please wait....

very poky today for sure

still hasn't loaded

JNK

hrm may be CDN issue

Lamak

@JNK seems fine to me too

JNK

It's a 'MURICA problem

Kris Gruttemeyer

Waiting for cdn.sstatic.net

JNK

yep

Lamak

13:28

c'mon @ypercube, The Heap needs another mod to amass power

Kris Gruttemeyer

JUST loaded

ypercube

@Lamak I'm the Marshall Cube ;)

bluefeet

@ypercube no worries. I get it

bluefeet

13:44

@Lamak yes we've got quite a few good ones

Kermit

my farts smell

bluefeet

I do think we should have some heapers in that pool

Kermit

@JNK i couldn't load it a few min ago

Kris Gruttemeyer

It seems to be better now, loads right up

Kermit

@KrisGruttemeyer That's what tech support said

Lamak

13:55

@bluefeet right?, @ypercube should totally go for it

Kermit

We lost a peering session with one of our ISPs and experienced a network reconvergence at 14:37 UTC. We are still working on the issue.

Tweeted by StackStatus on April 7, 2015 at 1:51 PM

Kris Gruttemeyer

Just went and ran SELECT GETUTCDATE() Strange because my UTC date shows it's only 2015-04-07 13:58:03.827. Are they in the future? :)

bluefeet

@AaronBertrand I took some of your advice regarding our transaction log testing. I split my table into 2 versions (current/archive), created a view and synonym to not break functionality, then implemented older merge syntax with - delete, update and insert. Not only did our transaction log backup on one table drop about 400MB but the performance improved. The procedure was taking about 480k+ms and I dropped it to about 15-20k+ms

Kermit

to those who twitter a lot ... if i want to dm someone, do they have to follow me first?

mmarie

yes

Kermit

14:05

so this happened... they have to follow me right?

@justadayito Sorry for that! Please DM us with the reward(s) you are missing as well as your email and mailing addresses.

Tweeted by MyCokeRewards on April 7, 2015 at 1:32 PM

Mark Sinkinson

@Kermit yes

@Kermit unless there is an account setting that allows DMs from non-followers...?

Kris Gruttemeyer

Tweet them back with 'Y U NO FOLLOW ME?'

Kermit

so happy that silicon valley is coming back

Kris Gruttemeyer

Security vulnerability found on sqlsaturday.com. Looks like the site is down for a day and a half

mmarie

Yep

You watching Grant and Brent argue on twitter this morning?

Kermit

14:16

@mmarie link or it didn't happen

mmarie

@GFritchey @gortok Ah, sorry, didn’t know that - I was looking at this reply thread, and it didn’t have that tweet on it.

Tweeted by BrentO on April 7, 2015 at 1:51 PM in reply to GFritchey

Read the whole thread

Lamak

so, grant was speaking about another tweet outside the conversation?

Aaron Bertrand

@KrisGruttemeyer "security vulnerability" = if you knew where to look you could get the home address of sponsors.

@GFritchey @mikehillwig @jdanton Well, then the verdict is in about those end users’ ability to test.

Tweeted by BrentO on April 7, 2015 at 1:07 PM in reply to GFritchey

^ twitter sucks at keeping conversations together. This was part of the conversation, but the reply thread doesn't string it together correctly.

mmarie

Thanks, I was looking for that.

Lamak

@AaronBertrand aah, didn't even see it

billinkc

14:21

an end user shouldn't be responsible for looking for security gaps

It's the jankyass suckholes that built the site using popups as navigation, defaulting to http for logins, etc, that should be hung from their entrails

mmarie

Yes, but there are a ton of usability issues as well that should have been caught

It took me 15 minutes to rack up a list of 5 or 6 things.

I appreciate some of the improvements they made, but I find it overall to be disappointing

Aaron Bertrand

PASS' problem is they do everything on the cheap - volunteers to build a web site that needs to stand up to the critique of people who build data solutions for a living.

You get what you pay for.

billinkc

But they don't let volunteers to the website

Aaron Bertrand

And realistically, this is a web site for free training events. I think the general expectations are a lot higher than they need to be. Does it need to perfect? No.

@billinkc That's not correct. They don't just let anyone wave their hands and get source code.

billinkc

I've asked, many times to be involved. I want to make reports (gasp) for sql saturday stuff but no, that's HQ IT's bailiwick

Aaron Bertrand

14:25

Asking <> here you go.

billinkc

Interesting

Aaron Bertrand

Not trying to belittle your abilities but they do have a full crop of volunteers working on that thing. Not doing a great job, but trying.

billinkc

My biggest issue is treating the rewrite as a marketing event.

We're doing so much work. You're going to love it. No, we can't tell you what it's going to be but you're going to love it.

mmarie

It just looks like they designed/tested early on, made changes, and didn't get one last pass to check everything once more.

Aaron Bertrand

What do you mean? Because they put a countdown on it?

mmarie

14:27

@billinkc THIS

@AaronBertrand The countdown, twitter, etc.

billinkc

I've sent far too many requests to HQ about things that don't work, that are broken, that perform poorly, impede our ability to do things on the sql saturday site

That's on our list. We've got a rewrite coming. It's going to address this

Aaron Bertrand

@mmarie I think they just had a lot of people who have no idea how to test for edge cases or for what real users would do. Did a search, it worked! Next? (Oh, I don't need to click back to make sure x is still there, etc)

mmarie

Yeah, that is what I said to Bill earlier this morning.

billinkc

If you go to the sql saturday meeting the day before pass, you can sit at the roundtable and we'll give you a sneak peek.

Oh, you can't make that meeting. Well, that sucks for you. No, I can't tell you what we're doing, that's NDA

Aaron Bertrand

Again, you get what you pay for. I could volunteer to go milk cows on a farm - I'd be helping, I suppose, but I probably won't get the same yield as someone with experience.

mmarie

14:31

I would have paid more money for this website and less money on the BA Conference. ;-) And I actually work in business analytics.

@AaronBertrand where are you from originally?

Aaron Bertrand

I just don't think they get the right volunteers, and I don't think they hire the right IT people, either. At one point I had 6 separate profiles associated with a single e-mail address. A MySQL newbie wouldn't let that happen, but PASS did. And it took them two weeks to figure out how to fix it.

@mmarie North Bay, Ontario

Kris Gruttemeyer

@mmarie But then where would we learn about all the buzzwords that we will be hearing this year?

Aaron Bertrand

North Bay, Ontario

North Bay is a city in Northeastern Ontario, Canada. It is the seat of Nipissing District, and takes its name from its position on the shore of Lake Nipissing. == History == The site of North Bay was on the main canoe route west from Montreal (see Canadian Canoe Routes (early)). Apart from First Nations tribes, voyageurs and surveyors, there was little activity in the Lake Nipissing area until the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1882. The CPR started its westward expansion from Callander Station (later renamed Bonfield), Ontario; Bonfield was inducted into Canadian Railway Hall...

mmarie

Pretty

@AaronBertrand Have you spent much time in Nova Scotia? I'm thinking about submitting to the SQL Saturday there and hanging out for a few days, but wondering if it is worth it. (I realize this is potentially a dumb question because I can't expect Canadians to have visited every part of their country, but I thought I would ask anyway on the chance that you have).

Aaron Bertrand

I have been to Nova Scotia but only for short periods, not enough to make any recommendations

mmarie

14:39

k, thanks

Aaron Bertrand

@mmarie this is last summer, from almost that same spot

(Looking out on the lake, though, not down the shore. We rented a cottage almost exactly where the picture you posted was taken.)

And this was a storm on that lake the same week

mmarie

Nice. Crazy clouds in the second one.

swasheck

14:58

oh. hey. another PASS controversy. we needed one this quarter, too.

back to prod issues. nothing to see here. move along.

mmarie

I <3 memes, but I'm not loving the Tableau 9 release twitter campaign twitter.com/hashtag/9memes?src=hash

Lamak

@mmarie oh, that's cringey

Mark Sinkinson

@mmarie Jeeeez

swasheck

@mmarie i'd like to see some of the shitty sql it throws against servers. you can have all the cool features in the world, but if you generate 50-pages of sql because you have a BA moron dragging and dropping cartesian products all over the place then it doesnt really matter

mmarie

It's like they tried to go old school for marketing on this release. At their release party they started talking about how they were inspired by "flow". I had an interview question on flow as a high school student trying to get into college. NOw they are rocking all kinds of old memes.

swasheck

15:02

not that i'm bitter about self-service BI right now

mmarie

lol

Mike Fal

@mmarie Wow, those are bad.

Mark Sinkinson

@swasheck We use QlikView here. Everything is preloaded into QlikView memory and then anything the BA does in the app has no bearing on SQL Server

mmarie

Yeah, we use extracts on my tableau project. They are SQL queries that we wrote that are refreshed once a day.

Mark Sinkinson

They 'can' do something called Direct Discovery, which is realtime querying, but they'd get a slap :)

swasheck

15:05

@MarkSinkinson we use cognos so we have idiot devs and BAs using an idiot orm reusing cartesian products because ... well ... just because. but somehow it's the database server's problem.

billinkc

Need more idiots

You hiring?

swasheck

i have had my fill

i'd like to join a consulting group so that when you see the stupidity and make recommendations and they respond with, "GFY" you can say ... "ok ... your money. your time. your problem. NEXT."

mmarie

you don't really get to say next that fast

Mark Sinkinson

@swasheck That sounds like my idea of hell...

swasheck

23-page cognos query, single-spaced, Consolas 8pt font

mmarie

15:07

i wish we did. i would be off my current project so fast

ok, except that one time when we had to part ways with a client for being awful.

swasheck

fair enough.

mmarie

Other than that, you suffer through it and realize that you just do the best you can and you don't own the product you are creating and it wasn't how you would do it and the project will be over in 3 months.

Mark Sinkinson

@mmarie That sounds like every software project ever...

mmarie

Heh. Probably true.

RT @BrentO: DBCC CHECKYOURSELF < DBCC CHECKYOURSELF(Before_Wreck, 1);

Tweeted by MidnightDBA on April 7, 2015 at 3:15 PM

James Lupolt

15:32

There is a scene on Mad Men this week that reminded me of what working for a consultancy can be like

The client has a really bad idea he wants implemented and isn't interested in listening to alternatives

One character says 'What do we do?'

The other says 'We keep the client.'

Lamak

jeezus, I get it!, the question isn't useful

"you don't have any way of knowing if a candidate answers truthfully", isn't this valid for every answer?. And I get it, you don't find the question useful, I don't know what more do you want — Lamak 20 secs ago

Mike Fal

@JNK Anytime someone advertises something using #sqlhelp, I report them for spam. Gets them off my feed and has some small impact against them. :)

JNK

@MikeFal it pisses me off to no end

if you're like promoting a blog post it's more understandable

Mike Fal

You and me both

Kermit

Ah shit. I forgot to nominate myself.

bluefeet

15:47

@Kermit still have time

ypercube

@Lamak you have been meta'ed

Lamak

@ypercube yeah, well.....I don't know what this guy wants

Kermit

stackoverflow.com/election/6#post-29495731

I nominated myself.

ypercube

@Kermit good luck.

I advise you edit that 4-line statement - and quickly.

Kermit

@ypercube nah. i just wanted to see my candidate score. how do i withdraw?

bluefeet

15:51

@Kermit you might want to expand on that a bit to be taken seriously

ypercube

I remember someone being heavily criticized in the previous elections for not having prepared a decent proposal.

Kermit

withdrawn

Lamak

@Kermit I also wanted to know that

bluefeet

you can calculate it using this

5

Q: How is candidate score calculated?

I know there is probably a duplicate floating around the web somewhere, but all my searches couldn't turn up how exactly candidate score is calculated. Is it based on badges? Reputation? Both?

Kermit

psh.. i don't want to do it myself

so only 3 people have 40/40

that'll be easy to vote

bluefeet

15:53

is that the only thing you are using to determine your vote?

ypercube

@Lamak, don't feed the trolls.

Kermit

pretty much. not worth reading the actual descriptions

Lamak

@bluefeet The deputy badge says "Raised 80 helpful flags.". I don't have that one even though I have more than 80 helpful flags?

ypercube

(and I kind of agree that it's not the bestly worded question but I can't find something to improve it)

bluefeet

@Lamak stackoverflow.com/help/badges/1002/deputy?userid=519216

Kermit

15:55

oh snap she showed you

Lamak

@bluefeet I was clicking the links on the meta answer you posted, and got confused I guess

bluefeet

@Lamak ah, those links point to Meta Stack Exchange

billinkc

Just passed 40k links to http://sqlfiddle.com on #StackOverflow : http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=url%3a%22http%3a%2f%2f*sqlfiddle.com%2f*%22 !!

Tweeted by sqlfiddle on April 7, 2015 at 3:58 PM

Zane

16:34

I would love to see a race between Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren.

Mike Fal

stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-lang <- Noting #2

billinkc

I wonder if that includes [no]SQL

swasheck

16:55

@billinkc no

Mike Fal

@swasheck Change of plans, I am doing the training on another week so I will be at the lunch.

billinkc

Huh, who'd a known that old dogs can learn new tricks

swasheck

@MikeFal go forth and prosper

i'm going to be troubleshooting cognos

Mike Fal

@swasheck eff cognos, come eat food with us

swasheck

can't. job depends on this

billinkc

16:58

Shoot cognos, troubles resolved

Lamak

@ypercube I think that this can be an interesting problem for you

1

Q: Select rows from hierarchy based on related nodes

I have a self-referencing table Foo [Id] int NOT NULL, [ParentId] int NULL, --Foreign key to [Id] [Type] char(1) NOT NULL [Id] is clustered primary key, indexes on [ParentId] and [Type] columns. Assume a maximum depth of 1 on the hierarchy (child nodes cannot have child nodes). I want to...

sql sql-server hierarchy

ypercube

17:19

Yeah. Kind of interesting.

Lamak

I overcomplicated things

ypercube

18:22

@Lamak i'm trying to work another approach

Lamak

I deleted my mess

Zane

@swasheck that sounds like the opposite of a good time.

swasheck

18:47

Not sure who is more deserving of a throat punch, cognos modelers or data modelers

Zane

19:00

The TeraData SQL assistant is butts.

Kris Gruttemeyer

@swasheck Any reason you can't throat punch both?

Mike Fal

@swasheck What @KrisGruttemeyer said. Kill them all, let God sort them out.

ypercube

@Lamak Why?

here is my mess: stackoverflow.com/questions/29496352/…

Thank you for making me lose 1 hour ;)

Kris Gruttemeyer

@MikeFal Mike, used one of your blogs as a reference for not suing default MAXDOP/CTP settings

mikefal.net/tag/maxdop

Lamak

@ypercube because it was a mess

Mike Fal

19:06

@KrisGruttemeyer Glad I could help! That's an old one, might need to revisit it.

Kris Gruttemeyer

@MikeFal The info is still solid. Used that and the village of Ozar's post on CXPACKET

Mike Fal

I'm having some pretty good blog karma today.

Lamak

@ypercube you are welcome

Kris Gruttemeyer

Well, one thing is the cost = # of seconds

Lamak

I undeleted mine now

Kris Gruttemeyer

19:08

"The default value for the cost threshold parameter is 5, so if a query is estimated to take longer than 5 seconds, SQL Server will parallelize it."

That may have been when cost could still be tied to seconds

before it became the unitless wonder it is today

swasheck

@KrisGruttemeyer problem-solving. i like it.

Zane

19:26

I wonder how many people watch some of Adam Machanic's presentations and then go home and bork their server because he is a mad genius and they are not.

3

swasheck

:)

Zane

So much of the stuff he shows is fun to play with but I don't trust myself to put it in use.

Kris Gruttemeyer

Star awarded for the use of the word 'bork'

Mike Fal

@Zane Mind if I tweet that? :)

Zane

Bork is the word I started using because Wells Fargo blocks the word fuck...

@MikeFal Get nuts.

Mike Fal

19:29

Let's go crazy.

Zane

@MikeFal solid Prince reference there.

Mike Fal

Glad you picked up on that.

Zane

Minnesotans have a pretty big love for anyone who's "one of us".

swasheck

what if god was one of us

Mike Fal

@swasheck He would disown you.

Zane

19:33

@swasheck I won't even play along with that stupid effing song.

Kris Gruttemeyer

Thank you for sticking that in my head now

Mike Fal

@KrisGruttemeyer All part of the excellent customer service.

Kris Gruttemeyer

It really is the gift that keeps on giving

Mike Fal

Here, I present you with this as an option:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWaFySmgC-8&list=PLaTBDUtj1IWDXY38rC7_cY3cJmbcrNJzM&index=11

Kris Gruttemeyer

@MikeFal I can now die happy, thanks for that. Haha

Mike Fal

19:38

I've been listening to RHCPipers all afternoon.

Kris Gruttemeyer

I didn't see that it was pipers initially. I expected Anthony Kiedis to start in. Well played

Shalom Slavin

20:02

Anyone here wanna take a stab @ a sql question?

Lamak

is it interesting and well written?

3

Mike Fal

The Heap does not stab SQL questions. We obliterate them with the firepower of a fully armed and operational battlestation.

5

billinkc

Which RDBMS? If it's mysql, afraid you're out of luck

Kris Gruttemeyer

Access? Also out of luck

Lamak

nosql?, out of luck (because it sucks)

ypercube

20:11

@ShalomSlavin have you posted the question at the site?

billinkc

20:34

So weird that a person opened a bounty on their question but then stopped looking at it

0

Q: SSIS Script Task Fails when run from SQL Agent

I’ve delete and rewritten this question as I don’t think I was being clear and it caused some frustration. I have a SSIS package that creates and populates an Excel sheet, the package runs perfectly and creates the files as desired and can be executed on a schedule from SQL Server Agent without...

ssis script-task

Zane

God this dude I'm talking to is such a knob.

He keeps saying that if he deploys something to prod and it doesn't work that the India dba team should just make it work instead of backing the change out.

They don't know the intent of your process. Stop releasing crap.

Lamak

that's more than being a knob, that's being inept

billinkc

The release to production should produce no outcome that was not encountered in pre-production environments. If this is not the case, the change is backed out and you wear a badge of shame

2

Zane

@Lamak Going on a 45 minute rant about why the India team can't just "make it go" seems like a thing knob would do.

@billinkc Exactly.

Lamak

he is both

Kris Gruttemeyer

20:50

Ahhh, just registered for some Brent O training in May. It felt good to pay for that thing with the company card.

JNK

@KrisGruttemeyer They put on a good class

I actually went to their first training conference like 2 or 3 years ago

Kris Gruttemeyer

@JNK I'm looking forward to it. Company is paying too, so double word score there.

Did you like it?

Material-wise?

Time to head out, we'll talk more later @JNK

ypercube

May 9 '13 at 12:10, by JNK

Talking to Brent Ozar about the SE stack...this trip is already worth it

@KrisGruttemeyer he was thrilled ^^^^

Max Vernon

23:00

It doesn't matter. Cause you may find it little and suggest a different solution. This is not a what is the right solution type of question. Several information has been left out for simplicity. I can tell you that the current schema needs re-engineering and that the decision has been that the reporting tables will match what we display on the screen which isn't currently the case. For archiving purposes (amongst other reasons) we cannot keep all data in one big table. We need to be flexible in what we can delete without blocking ongoing reporting on those tables. — Yannis 53 mins ago

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The Heap™ – Consultancy ©®