The Heap™ – Consultancy ©®

8:53 AM

Morning

1 hour later…

9:54 AM

Was the "Ask-a-question" wizard rolled ever doc'd up properly?

in a public way, i mean (obviously)

in terms of what it does/where it's deployed

reading the "release" meta post and "impact" blog post atm, fwiw

10:10 AM

typo'd my commit message into the title box a minute ago and got a fun message saying "computer says no", just wondering if that's what it is

Andriy M

10:21 AM

@PeterVandivier I think it's the word "code", it may be banned from question titles.

A: SQL Server Always-On Availability Groups Patching

boooo... that's so mundane... i demand magic!

2 hours later…

George.Palacios

12:11 PM

This is an unsupported configuration as per the docs Mixing versions of SQL Server instances in the same AG is not supported outside of a rolling upgrade and should not exist in that state for extended periods of time as the upgrade should take place quickly. The other option for upgrading SQ...

Another "Check the docs" answer

12:21 PM

Yooooooo

Reading Rust in Izmir.

Today is a good day to be me.

1:04 PM

Here is another good question to reflect upon. dba.stackexchange.com/q/159634/2639

I asked that question in 2016.

Got 5 downvotes, right away.

Years later. +7 upvotes and 10,000 views. Now a "famous question."

Why does this happen all the time?

I think it's worth thinking about anyway. The downvotes in this system send an immediate negative feedback to the person asking the question (more often than not) and often different questions are hostility received, especially if self-answered. But in the end, if you wait long enough, those question very very frequently come out on top and become famous questions with tons of upvotes.

Here I just had that same problem this week: stackoverflow.com/questions/57761010/…

Self-answered question about the internal location of the inherited constructor in Python

Got wrongfully closed as a duplicate on an unrelated question, because some jerk has a dupe hammer on that tag.

Bet that question would hit 10k views in 5 years too.

2 hours later…

3:16 PM

@EvanCarroll it's still a poor question.

→ 2 messages moved to Trash

Why is that? Any question where I spend over 30 minutes looking at internal code is useful to others, as someone eventually will do the same thing.

Both the top answers suggest row_number() over(), which you exclude with no explanation.

if you are going to refuse to use the right tool for the job, it's best if you have a reason you can articulate.

Super serious not-sarcastic is "I'm curious" enough?

and if not, why? I mean, why is this tool not fit for learning but only for best-practices?

"You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face."

I don't think "I'm curious" usually fits that bill

That's a valid point. Extremely sad and disappointing, but I mean it's not the letter of the law there.

3:25 PM

If you want to bend the rules put the extra effort into inventing a plausible reason why you might really not be able to use a windowing function — that's less frustrating for those trying to help who want to provide an answer.

Would a question pertaining to doc clarification also qualify as practical and based on actual problems? I mean, if I asked "what does the doc mean by this" and it wasn't related to an actual problem but just a casual reading of the docs, would that qualify?

Q: Change in microsoft documentation

I am confused after microsoft changed the documentation style. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/active-secondaries-readable-secondary-replicas-always-on-availability-groups Earlier we used to be able to change the version of sql server at the top ...

sql-server

Q: Misunderstanding statement in MySQL documentation

I can't understand this statement in Optimizing Data Size: Declare columns with identical information in different tables with identical data types, to speed up joins based on the corresponding columns. Can anyone describe this statement with example?

mysql-5.5 optimization

there are also plenty of closed documentation questions

I guess the problem there is that again, that's just curiosity -- no? I mean what the documentation says is never a practical problem. The real problem they're trying to solve is the one they consult the documentation for?

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that I want to widen the scope of the site, that's kind of been my MO for a while. I didn't realize that the scope had the term "practical" in there, and I think it's probably even more problematic than "not basic" or whatever which was in the FAQ too.

depends what you mean by practical. I take it as 'a problem you are actually facing at work' or similar. That doesn't exclude problems with documentation.

In the pursuit of learning, it's totally practical. ;)

3:33 PM

It does exclude things that aren't problems though — "I have an excellent solution but I'm looking for an alternative" isn't really a problem that people often get motivated about helping other folk with.

@EvanCarroll you have to draw the line somewhere and that draws it nowhere

Which is fair, and that's actually the crux of my argument there.

I totally agree not everyone will want to help with these questions, but to close or discourage them when they'll help others seems like a bad idea.

I don't think those questions are any help to anyone else — curiosity seems to be very personal and esoteric. Unlike actual problems people face that often are faced in a very similar way by lots of other people.

Very personal and esoteric, yeppp! But, alas, they do seem to help out a lot of other people. I mean, let's go with the absolute most trivial non-technical question I have, dba.stackexchange.com/questions/17691/…

That's my fourth most upvoted question.

absolutely no practical point of that.

lol

Second most upvoted question: dba.stackexchange.com/questions/168595/… just as useless.

I mean SQL-86 probably has 0 practical value by any measure.

Except to satisfy curiosity

3:53 PM

Those aren't practical but 'acceptable in moderation according to meta — the proviso is that they have to be occasional and 'interesting' — ie not just interesting to the OP

incidentally I upvoted both

2 hours later…

Philᵀᴹ

6:14 PM

Regarding the above. I will admit that you have chilled a bit now @EvanCarroll - you were like a bull in a china shop when you first arrived here. You have definitely grown as far as this site has concerned