A chairde - Morning all!

Morning

@ypercubeᵀᴹ Nice - will include in my own answer later...

Morning

Morning

Interesting link here - direct link here - may need to register. Turkmenistan is the world's most expensive capital... for "expats".... I always treat these guides with a pinch of salt.

I lived in Paris for 5 years and when I tell people, they invariably go "But wasn't it terribly expensive...?" (or similar). Yeah, sure it's expensive if you sit on the terrace on the Champs-Élysées - walk around the corner and stand at the bar of a side-street cafe, and it's très abordable. Dublin is 39 between Brazzaville and Dhaka...

@Vérace where is Athens and New York on the list? Just curious, not enough to give them all my details for a download ;)

@Vérace Where did you rent in Paris?

I agree if you just go in one of the smaller streets and find a good restaurant instead of going to the tourist traps food isn't expensive (or not more than in other places)

@TomV The Vth, the 13th, the 12th and the 11th - I spent two weeks in the suburbs once - jamais plus! My rental areas (apart from the Vth), weren't the trendiest or toniest but decent enough - Vth was kind of a special one-off situation where I totally lucked out! Wherever I lived, I could always walk home from a soirée if I missed the last Métro!

@ypercubeᵀᴹ Athens is 115 and New York is 13. The problem is we have no idea how the index is calculated - is this living in 5 star hotels, dining on the hoof or what? Are we talking about going to the local Lidl or buying food while living in a luxury appt on Bleecker st. in NY? I worked for a company which had a Pakistani bank as a customer - the guy who went over to give training had to have an armed guard when he went outside of his hotel - does that count as a cost?

Is this: Brexit: EU citizens given 28-day deadline to apply to stay in UK affecting anybody?

@Vérace I wonder if it's cost of living related to average salary after tax?

See livingcost.org/cost/turkmenistan

Hmm, for "expats".

I'm not sure that "normal" salary criteria apply! What's the average salary in Ashgabat - No. 1? I think it's meant as a guide for companies sending staff to these cities and not for "normal"/domestic staff?

Morning

@Vérace I usually stay in the 11eme as well, it's reasonably priced, and there is always something to do/see

the clochards and such are just part of it but that doesn't really bother me

However I never needed to pay rent since it were short assignments my employer payed hotel costs

it's just that if you stay on la defense for example there isn't anything to do unless you take the metro somewhere

@TomV Just to note, I wasn't "staying", I was living long term. There are a couple of areas around the Gare du Nord which are best avoided late at night, but down towards République and the Grands Boulevards, it's very pleasant and lively. The area was badly hit in 2015 - haven't been back since - a friend who owns a bar there was on Irish media re. the attacks. They pulled the shutters and got a couple of hurleys and sat it out!

La Défense is a quartier d'affaires... a bit like the city in London - dead after 19:30...

@Vérace what Vth stands for?

@McNets 5th arrondissement

@TomV ok

@McNets - sorry about that - if I started with Roman numerals, I should have stayed with them! :-)

Just a quick question about the review queues... I was going through and somebody had asked for more information - fair enough. I thought that I'd give the OP some time to respond, so I hit skip - will I see that post again or is my skip permanent?

@Vérace The skip is permanent, but 10k users can see the history of the queue, optionally just their own reviews via the history tab.

Still current AFAIK

@PaulWhite - The skip doesn't appear to be permanent - I can look at my skipped reviews, pick out the post and then I was able to VtC - didn't put the final submit, but it all looked kosher up to that point. Might be nice to have a review later option/re-review after 12/24 hours and have it fall back into our queue?

@Vérace Skip means you won't be shown it in the review queue again. Your "skipped reviews" are the way to go back at revisit ones you skipped, where you can of course vote any way you like, just as you can outside of review.

I think it would be nice if Skip was not permanent. But it's not up to me.

It's worse as a mod because I feel sort of obligated to Skip when I'm not sure enough to be unilateral. It's really inconvenient to try to go back over those I have Skipped.

The review queue often looks empty to me when in fact there are heaps of pending reviews.

Also: it's kinda pointless if no one casts the final vote.

Well not pointless, but you know what I mean I think.

@PaulWhite worth suggesting in meta?

It's hardly a huge ask... ?

Maybe. On main meta it would probably get closed as dupe of e.g. meta.stackexchange.com/q/153430 but that's main meta for you. I doubt there would be scope for reviews to work differently on one site than all the others. But I don't really know.

You'd have to think about exactly how you'd want it to work.

How long should a skipped item not reappear for you? How many times can it reappear? Can it reappear before things you haven't seen before? Things like that.

For clarity, I think it's a good idea.

On the other hand skipping because the post might be edited is actually the wrong this to do. We should be quick to close, and just as quick to reopen when the post is improved as needed.

@PaulWhite - surely that's a piece of cake? You set it in your profile - after 12 - 24 - 36 - 48 - 72 hours - reshow 1, 2 or 3 times... I'm not really a webby-cody person, but as a programmer in a previous life, this is not really a big ask! Or even per question settings wouldn't be outrageous - a few bytes at most!

I think that being quick on the trigger for closing could lead to discouraged New Contributors?

@Vérace How many things on the site can be specified with that degree of personal customization? That should tell you something about how easy it is, or at least how willing SE Inc is to invest time into that sort of thing.

@Vérace Depends entirely what feedback and encouragement they get during the close-reopen cycle.

I thought we were a "community" and that our precious input was "treasured"! :-)

The worst experience is being ignored.

As Oscar Wilde said - there's only one thing worse than people talking about you behind your back; people not talking about you behind your back! :-)

Right, and funnily enough, waiting a week for a close review to complete looks a lot like being ignored to someone who can't see close votes

So I'm sort of talking myself out of supporting this option now

Having your question closed is at least not being ignored

It might be difficult to make a strong case for this change after all

It's probably only a matter of time before 3 votes to close and reopen is standard everywhere

28 posts currently pending close votes

I'm on my lunchbreak - plus, I still haven't received my $7.5k! :-)

I can send my IBAN if desired!

That holiday in the south of France won't pay for itself!

Yeah I expect my cheque is in the post as well.

12 in the close votes queue now

What tool do you all use for schema compare? I have become increasingly dissastified with Azure Data Studio's compare - for instance, I ask to ignore comments and the objects are still included. (Also, note to all code-generation tools, while it's nice that you put the date of generation in a comment, many times, this just causes more trouble than it's worth - consider making that an option)

@CadeRoux I use redgate's

Testing it now. Been years since I used it. Weirdly, it requires you to unzip a dacpac if you want to use it on one side of the comparison.

Not just unzip, it requires it to be unpacked and turned into a SQL file, yet...

FML, why doesn't shit just work - this was a dacpac I just extracted from a server using Azure Data Studio.

Well, SSMS doesn't want to extract it. Says there is an ambiguous reference in a proc. Go to ALTER PROC to see if there is a problem, no problem reported by SQL Server...

...and it refuses to unpack the new one made with SSMS with exactly the same useless error.

Collective, but still serfs. Nice touch.

Basically, they have rebuilt CompuServe vendor boards with newer bits and pieces

with a borg touch

It's definitely a gap over the years. Companies that have done it themselves, the experience is really poor compared to Stack Overflow, but official company presence has always been poor on Stack Overflow. Companies like Raspberry Pi have forums which aren't that great for some aspects of interaction, and companies like Adafruit have their stuff spread out over Discord and their official longform howtos. And others I use like tableau are just a depressing hodgepodge.

how many were sticky?

does anyone else think its dumb to use Excel to create UPDATE statements, or is it just me

🤦‍♀️

More specifically, this particular sheet has over 20,000 rows, each could result in a single UPDATE statement, whereas I could write a single UPDATE statement to accomplish the same thing after importing the sheet. I know which one I prefer lol.

@HannahVernon That sounds like one of the worst possible implementations of dynamic SQL haha.

yah, I wish my boss hadn't said to do that. But I'm just a lowly grunt now.

I mean at least with SQL Injection it's predictable lol

this sh*t throws all hope of ever having it run reliably right out the window

it's defenestrated as they say

It depends. If it's a one off thing to make a statement for me to run from a sheet that someone imposed upon me, I have done it.

I suppose there is a slight barrier to entry on getting Excel data into SQL Server under various circumstances that might make it more practical to just copy-and-paste the commands out of Excel instead of importing the sheet, then constructing dynamic SQL.

the one bonus from doing 20,000 update statements instead of one is that the DTUs goes through the roof, making MSFT holders richer.

If I have to look at the data in crafting the code generation statements - and especially if there is conditions like CASE/COALESCE(), I prefer it's in a table where I can query it first. You know, where 10,000 rows into it there is a non-numeric bit of text in what is supposed to be a number column. Or smart quotes that came from other office products and shit.

And of course, once it's in a real table, then it's probably going to be just one insert or update.

And I certainly have converted Excel -> INSERT using PowerShell code-generation scripts, just not using Excel formulas. Because frankly, Excel in Office 365/OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams is the best tool for real-time collaboration for small data. We define all our DataMart rules in Excel. They go from there to XML to SQL Inserts into our configuration tables.

Eventually we might have the time to replace the Excel step and have a whole dedicated front-end system that allows multiple people to do the mapping design and then export the XML into our build and install process. But in Teams, having one place for the Excel files and not having to wait for someone to check in a file or having to figure out how to merge two Excel files, that's about the best thing there is until we were to build a dedicated system for that aspect.

I currently injest a lot of weird stuff into our build process to get into a nice simple .sql install script that does everything and doesn't need filesystem access for BCP. XSLTs to be applied for certain transforms - basically inserts a entire files into an XML column. Excels/XML for rules that have to go into mapping tables.