The Heap™ – Consultancy ©®

Morning all

@MaxVernon It's very disempowering - Windows is really hard to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Unless you can find the answer to your question through some google-fu you're often buggered.

Colin 't Hart

@Philᵀᴹ Belated congratulations!

For example, I have a mix of portrait and landscape monitors (1x 2560x1600 and 1x1600x1200 portrait). Most software eventually crashes the application or display driver if I try to use it on the portrait screen. No idea why and nobody can answer the question on the interwebs.

I was thinking of getting one of the 3840x1600 ultra-wide screens but they're huge - 37" diagonal. It would also require me to turn over my computer equipment for something with 4k support, which I'm not really minded to do at the moment.

It's a first world problem, but one which has resisted solution for years.

Also, if the network shits itself on Windows 10, it's next to impossible to intervene to fix it. You're more or less dependent on the automated diagnostics to work - which they might eventually.

With a NT5-series build like Win 2k or 2k3 you could manually intervene in this stuff a lot more easily.

8:40 AM

@hot2use it's possibly worth a closure to make the point more prominent

or reject the edits

when did @JNK resign from being a mod? I somehow missed it.

3

I haven't seen much of @JNK here for a long time. What is he up to now?

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells maybe started travelling with the HAL in his avatar

8:56 AM

@dezso Just keep an eye on him if you need him to open the pod bay doors.

@dezso So did I, probably many others too.

9:36 AM

@AndriyM @hot2use @dezso Hey everyone, it seems that user has asked for a profile merge, but the process has not completed for some reason. I have escalated it to a Community Manager. In the meantime, please assume the user is doing all they can and please do not reject their edits.

@PaulWhite No problem, thanks for the notice!

No worries, I can see how it might get frustrating, but from what I can see they really have tried to follow the advice you all have given. Skip the reviews if you find them annoying.

@PaulWhite thanks for having another look

hot2use

9:57 AM

@PaulWhite Thanks

sure thing

10:28 AM

@PaulWhite do you know something about JNK?

@dezso Sure. He'd been inactive for a long period of time due to changes at work etc (as he said himself in The Heap many times). Eventually there was a review and the diamond status was removed. Like any elected mod in good standing, he can reclaim it at any time, if his circumstances change.

@PaulWhite Does that mean there won't be any election to find a replacement in the nearest future, to give him some time to reclaim the status, or does that mean that even if someone is elected in the meantime, he'll still be allowed to reclaim it based on his good record?

@AndriyM The current mod team was surveyed and it was decided no additional moderator was needed at this time. It is reviewed regularly.

I see, thanks

It makes sense if you think about it because JNK wasn't around for .... oh I don't know ... must have been more than a year, and we coped easily.

10:40 AM

Absolutely

11:02 AM

@PaulWhite yes, that much I knew and noticed that he was busy with life

I thought JNK might post something to meta, but clearly he was too busy 😃

Or simply didn't want to draw attention to it.

Anyway, there was no drama.

Max Vernon

12:32 PM

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells you make some excellent points there. Windows is not as pain-free as it would like to be. Although, as a Microsoft apologist, I think complexity is to blame.

1:01 PM

Windows is effectively a legacy system now. It has a lot of baggage to run existing software such as MS Office. The userspace is something of a baroque monstrosity that's growing many redundant subsystems - Win32, WPF, DCOM, WCF, Metro, attempts at tablet support etc. Having said that, Linux has a similar category of problem these days because of Gnome, KDE, systemd and so forth.

Ironically, BSD remains relatively stable because of its conservative change control policy, which is something of a double edged sword. It retains backward compatibility and stability but it has trouble supporting the features of modern hardware, and a not inconsiderable amount of the BSD user space is ported across from Linux.

Arguably the problem is one caused by bit rot in old software and competitive pressure to add features. The Linux kernel is a pretty solid system - Linus's apologies notwithstanding - but the userspace is starting to become a dog's breakfast.

Maybe I should switch to Haiku.

NUMA support, for example, is still fairly immature on BSD, and pretty much any two or four socket box built in the last 10 years is a NUMA architecture.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells and basically there have been no no-{two or four socket box}es (except, of course)

In theory, systemd is a good idea - it's actually based on Launchd on OSX and the seervices APIs on Windows (!). In practice it's a whole new subsystem that does the same thing as existing traditional posix-y subsystems differently and incompatibly.

@dezso BSD would run fine on a 1U single socket machine with a mainstream SCSI, SAS or SATA-supported motherboard chipset, which actually describes the architecture of most web or edge servers. In practice, most NUMA-capable Opteron or Xeon chipsets support alternating pages across sockets so half your memory accesses are local. The overhead for this is not all that great (in comparison the the remote memory penalty on old NUMA kit like Sequents) so nobody cares all that much.

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells and with annoying bugs (or bug-like behaviour)

However, on a database server or some other machines where you can optimise memory or I/O the poor NUMA support is a potential downside.

OTOH, does either MySQL or PostgreSQL actually have support for processor or I/O affinity? Does MongoDB or any of the other web scale NoSQL products?

According to the interwebs MySQL has support for CPU affinity.

jadarnel27

Speaking of Linux: Linus Torvalds is taking a break from Linux to wash his soapy mouth out

1:16 PM

@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Postgres doesn't, AFAI can tell

Linus Torvalds To Nvidia - "Fuck You"

@dezso I couldn't see any reference to it either.

►

I'm going to miss that.

This implies that MongoDB has some CPU affinity support. jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-26788

Looks like JVMs support processor affinity to some extent as well.

ypercubeᵀᴹ

6:06 PM

@Ivanov right, thnx. Seems like the page was removed from Wikipedia at October 2017 (reason: "Notability of term called into question."): Sargable: Revision history The page content can still be viewed in the Internet Archive: web.archive.org : Wikipedia: Sargable — ypercubeᵀᴹ 1 min ago

Any suggestions on how to edit my answer?

Q: What does the word "SARGable" really mean?

7:11 PM

If pure definition, without much elaboration is enough, you could link to the Wiktionary article on sargable.

Ideally, it should be a link to a DBA.SE question discussing the topic, but we probably don't have one

Oh, we do:

-4

SQL Server users use the term "sargable". I'm wondering if there is an objective implementation-agnostic timeless definition for "sargable." For instance, WHERE foo LIKE '%bar%' is said by many to be not sargable, but some RDBMSs are able to use indexes on such queries. What then does "not sarga...

terminology

@ypercubeᵀᴹ Sorry, meant to notify you but forgot, see ^^^

Max Vernon

I'm ashamed of myself now. I just used RIGHT JOIN instead of rewriting the query to use a LEFT JOIN. LAZY BASTARD!

Q: Can we reopen this question?

8:39 PM

Originally closed by @MaxVernon, @Phil, mustaccio, @AndriyM, and @RLF

Master Database

1

There is a question by Evan Carroll about the origins of "sargable" that initially had received some "tough love" and got closed as off-topic. I was among those who voted to close it (as too localized), at the time it looked to me more like a rant. Recently I saw it in the "Reopen" queue, and no...

discussion

9:11 PM

Added my voice

Q: DBA's updated site theme is ready for testing!

I swear Master Database waits for someone else to post the link

Let's try it again

let the wailing and complaining commence!

2

Master Database

0

As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing. If you can't see it right now, that's by design! This is a very early test implementation of your d...

discussion featured design

2

spooky

9:41 PM

> The site title "Database Administrators" seems a little lost.

Actually, the design of the top area in the new theme no longer makes sense

In the old theme it resembles an ERD, in the new one it's just lines and small circles without much meaning