• (cs)
    Jake Vinson:

    Oracle by default, but also seamlessly support SQL Server.

    sends a "SELECT * FROM [table]" for each table in the query,

    Gotta love the term 'seamless'.  It's so much more marketing than reality.

    Who is the genious that came up with 'SELECT * FROM [table]'?  You can see he only got though page 1 of the manual.

    Sounds like Paula to me!

    No ... i'm fist

  • Ciaran (unregistered)

    Rubbish again. WTF?

  • (cs)
    Jake Vinson:
    • doesn't do any caching or indexing
    That's the part I really like. I suppose building a cache or index would hurt performance. Oh, wait...
  • (cs)

    Initially designed to protect your eyes from cigarette smoke, our new range of Paulite<font size="2">(TM) </font>Goggles will protect against all of these hazards*


    • Lava
    • Radioactive Sludge
    • Chemical Waste

    <font size="2">
    *Please note that in order to get the most effective use from your Paulite(TM) Goggles you must have eye surgery to replace the organic parts of the eyeball with granite replacements. Please contact Paulite(TM) Surgical Clinic for our easy credit plans.

    </font>



  • (cs)
    Jake Vinson:

    Well, it turns out that not testing it was an unfortunate oversight.


    This line in particular made me laugh. "Unforunate oversight" indeed! Yes, yes, it could happen to anybody... I guess they skipped testing because it would have added $10,000 to the bill, and the customers were a little reluctant after putting out all those other hundreds of thousands...
  • Hmmm (unregistered)

    Initech.......Initech.........Initech
    Hmm, where have I heard that name before?


    OH

    Office Space...

  • TwinDagger (unregistered) in reply to InfiniteLoop
    InfiniteLoop:
    Initially designed to protect your eyes from cigarette smoke, our new range of Paulite<font size="2">(TM) </font>Goggles will protect against all of these hazards*


    - Lava
    - Radioactive Sludge
    - Chemical Waste

    <font size="2">
    *Please note that in order to get the most effective use from your Paulite(TM) Goggles you must have eye surgery to replace the organic parts of the eyeball with granite replacements. Please contact Paulite(TM) Surgical Clinic for our easy credit plans.

    </font>



    You rock.

  • andyl (unregistered) in reply to R.Flowers
    R.Flowers:
    Jake Vinson:

    Well, it turns out that not testing it was an unfortunate oversight.


    This line in particular made me laugh. "Unforunate oversight" indeed! Yes, yes, it could happen to anybody... I guess they skipped testing because it would have added $10,000 to the bill, and the customers were a little reluctant after putting out all those other hundreds of thousands...


    The company I work for refuses to purchase the screenreader software our clients use to "view" the sites we create for them
  • (cs) in reply to andyl
    andyl:


    The company I work for refuses to purchase the screenreader software our clients use to "view" the sites we create for them

    So you're... *heh* ... working blind?

    Oh yes - I went there.
  • Jerry (unregistered) in reply to Bus Raker

    Gotta love the spelling of Genius...

    Bus Raker:
    Gotta love the term 'seamless'.  It's so much more marketing than reality.

    Who is the genious that came up with 'SELECT * FROM [table]'?  You can see he only got though page 1 of the manual.

    Sounds like Paula to me!

    No ... i'm fist

  • (cs) in reply to Jerry
    Jerry:

    Gotta love the spelling of Genius...

    Bus Raker:
    Gotta love the term 'seamless'.  It's so much more marketing than reality.

    Who is the genious that came up with 'SELECT * FROM [table]'?  You can see he only got though page 1 of the manual.


    More like an ingenious!

    No, that's not right...
  • (cs) in reply to andyl
    Anonymous:
    R.Flowers:
    Jake Vinson:

    Well, it turns out that not testing it was an unfortunate oversight.


    This line in particular made me laugh. "Unforunate oversight" indeed! Yes, yes, it could happen to anybody... I guess they skipped testing because it would have added $10,000 to the bill, and the customers were a little reluctant after putting out all those other hundreds of thousands...


    The company I work for refuses to purchase the screenreader software our clients use to "view" the sites we create for them
    Oooooooh... Not to worry, that will just cost them their business. No cash outlay required! (My sympathy, by the way. By your comment, it's obvious which side of that debate you're on. I do hope they either learn or have other products/lines of business.)
  • foonly (unregistered) in reply to andyl
    Anonymous:
    R.Flowers:
    Jake Vinson:

    Well, it turns out that not testing it was an unfortunate oversight.


    This line in particular made me laugh. "Unforunate oversight" indeed! Yes, yes, it could happen to anybody... I guess they skipped testing because it would have added $10,000 to the bill, and the customers were a little reluctant after putting out all those other hundreds of thousands...


    The company I work for refuses to purchase the screenreader software our clients use to "view" the sites we create for them


    Reminds me of a customer we were supplying workstations to.  The customer was writing font design software.  I asked one of the developers about how the font design process worked.  He said that none of them had ever used the software, they only wrote it!
  • (cs) in reply to JBL
    JBL:
    Jake Vinson:
    • doesn't do any caching or indexing

    That's the part I really like. I suppose building a cache or index would hurt performance. Oh, wait...

    Not quite - what if the table in 'select * from [table]' changed, but it's contents had been cached on the client? Yes, I know caching should do implicit updates, but their mechanism doesn't seem to support dynamic anything (except, perhaps stupidity). Better to brute force it every time, regardless of cost in time, money, customers, sanity, .... wait, ?

  • disenchanted (unregistered) in reply to Ciaran
    Anonymous:
    Rubbish again. WTF?


    I agree... I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past couple of weeks...
    I guess everyone has become a better programmer after reading this sight and all the silly mistakes have been listed so no one will ever make a "craptastic" (captcha) function / program again!
  • (cs)

    Ok, since so many folks seem bored with the WTF's on the main board, let's start something new:

    1. Micro$oft rules
    2. VBA rules M$
    3. AJAX *is* Web 2.0
    4. Bean Bag Girl is really only twelve, but has a great air-brusher
    5. Foosball girl is really a guy on estrogen (everyone knows no good looking women become programmers)
    

    Let the flames begin...

  • (cs) in reply to Jerry
    Anonymous:

    Gotta love the spelling of Genius...

    Bus Raker:

    Who is the genius that came up with 'SELECT * FROM [table]'? 

    Know thyme 4 spel cheque wen ewe whant 2 B fist

    Brillant!

  • Yaytay (unregistered) in reply to disenchanted

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Rubbish again. WTF?


    I agree... I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past couple of weeks...
    I guess everyone has become a better programmer after reading this sight and all the silly mistakes have been listed so no one will ever make a "craptastic" (captcha) function / program again!

    No no no, this is a good one.

    A piece of software that sells for ludicrous amounts of money that works about as well as something I could knock up in my shed in an afternoon (and which basically does the precise opposite of what you'd want).

    Captcha = quality, and after a small hiatus we do have a reasonable quality WTF here.

  • (cs) in reply to Hmmm
    Anonymous:
    Initech.......Initech.........Initech
    Hmm, where have I heard that name before?

    OH

    Office Space...


    You must be new here.
  • Alexander (unregistered)
    Jake Vinson:
    sends a "SELECT * FROM [table]" for each table in the query

    I had something like that once. One of our database servers was performing really bad, and to find out why, we enabled query logging. We found quite a lot of "SELECT * FROM ..." queries on just about every table, every couple of minutes. Some of those tables included BLOBs, hence the performance hit.

    When we asked the developer of the application which sent those queries, he replied: "How else am I supposed to find out if the table exists and has the correct fields?"

    CAPTCHA = error :-)

  • (cs)

    Wow, this could work with ANY database software.  You'd only have to write one query for each type of db and have a switch to select which one. 

  • (cs) in reply to Alexander

    Anonymous:
    Jake Vinson:
    sends a "SELECT * FROM [table]" for each table in the query
    I had something like that once. One of our database servers was performing really bad, and to find out why, we enabled query logging. We found quite a lot of "SELECT * FROM ..." queries on just about every table, every couple of minutes. Some of those tables included BLOBs, hence the performance hit. When we asked the developer of the application which sent those queries, he replied: "How else am I supposed to find out if the table exists and has the correct fields?" CAPTCHA = error :-)

    Simple, walk over to the DB server, remove the disk, put it on a wooden table, take a picture, scan it at HIGH resolution, display in Paint, zoom in on the bits representing the table, and voila!

  • (cs) in reply to Yaytay
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Rubbish again. WTF?


    I agree... I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past couple of weeks...
    I guess everyone has become a better programmer after reading this sight and all the silly mistakes have been listed so no one will ever make a "craptastic" (captcha) function / program again!

    No no no, this is a good one.

    A piece of software that sells for ludicrous amounts of money that works about as well as something I could knock up in my shed in an afternoon (and which basically does the precise opposite of what you'd want).

    Captcha = quality, and after a small hiatus we do have a reasonable quality WTF here.

    Hmmmm, I suppose, with some effort, I could knock out a piece of crap in one afternoon, and I would like to make ludicrous amounts of money... I mean, if these idiots can do it, surely the rest of us could too...

  • (cs)

    I use this gateway and this is not my experience. About a 10% hit in records per second. If your developing resource expensive stored procedures in Oracle and having them use MSSQL as their data source I can see bad things. If your using Oracle to hit MSSQL which has odbc linked tables back to Oracle yeah that could suck. Or if your hitting MSSQL and the data is linked to an Access database or similar source.

    I reads like your suggesting that it asks the MSSQL agent to dump entire tables for every query and then parses the data on the Oracle side? This is false. Even when you select data from different data sources in the same query "select oratest.id,mssql.name from here.oratest, there.mssql where oratest.id=mssql.id" it doesn't do that (which is an impressive feature)

    As far as lack of caching or indexing, this is not true. A simple trace on the MSSQL agent side shows this.

    A quick Google peak shows some nice comparisons from end users. Mostly dealing with DB2's gateway.

  • gRegor (unregistered) in reply to disenchanted

    No more silly mistakes.  I doubt it.  "site".  :-)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to disenchanted

    Unfortunately, their spelling skills haven't kept up with their new found programming skills...

  • Bunny (unregistered) in reply to Hmmm
    Anonymous:
    Initech.......Initech.........Initech
    Hmm, where have I heard that name before?


    OH

    Office Space...



    No, no, you are thinking of Bun-i-tech:

    www.angryalien.com
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Bunny

    Can we get back to the conversation about women with bad breath?

  • (cs)

    Jake Vinson:
    Gabe shares his story of Sumo Lounge high tech beanbag furniture offers the stylish, versatile solution for modern

    This is almost the exact same story as yesterday and the day before.  Can we get something new?

  • (cs)

    Typically, getting software to work on two database platforms requires a lot of work, testing, and rework.

    I disagree. A carefully designed database abstraction layer, such as an O-R mapping tool, will get your software working on as many platforms as you like with little work, very little rework, and very straightforward testing.  You don't get the full feature set of each database, but usually who needs it?

    Of course, if you're one of the millions of morons still appending where clauses to strings...yeah, you're shit out of luck.

  • Hexar (unregistered) in reply to GrandmasterB
    GrandmasterB:

    Jake Vinson:
    Gabe shares his story of Sumo Lounge high tech beanbag furniture offers the stylish, versatile solution for modern

    This is almost the exact same story as yesterday and the day before.  Can we get something new?

    The Real WTF (tm) is definitely those ads on the right.  Take the first one for example.  What is this ad trying to say?  Cute underage blonde girls will sit on your furniture if you buy from us?  Is the girl stylish and versatile, or is it just the beanbag furniture?  And what the crap is "space age" nylon? 

    Regarding the second ad: Is it just me or does it look like someone pasted her head on top of her body?  It looks really fake, and her head's too big.  You gotta admit though, she looks pretty ripped.  I bet she can really slam that foosball around the table...

    Third, we have Opera 9.  Why you would name a browser after a musical performance is somewhat beyond me, but so is the reasoning behind a flammable vulpine.  Fortunately though, despite the arbitrary name, it has Widgets!  And BitTorrent!  Now I can keep on the cutting edge, thank god.  I always knew widgets would come in handy one day.

    The class action ad is the best.  That old lawyer dude means business.  Look at his snarl, and the way he's pointing at the camera.  I bet Alltel is shaking in their boots.  Still.  This is the best part though, "Some class action litigants are going to be very happy about that, and someone named Chad isn?t."  WTF?

  • An Independent Consultant (unregistered)
    Jake Vinson:

    Instead of parsing the query and generating a similar one for the other database server, it

    • sends a "SELECT * FROM [table]" for each table in the query,
    • processes the query locally
    • doesn't do any caching or indexing

    This would occasinally cause queries that took less than a second on one server to take minutes on the other if the table was large enough.



    I had the same experience a few years back when I was called in to help a company using Access as a front end to SQL Server.  I believe the layer which performed this magic was called "Jet Engine".  To avoid it they had to create stored procedures for all queries that joined.  Of course, they eventually gave up on Access as a front end.
     
    -Kevin

  • PublicLurker (unregistered) in reply to foonly

    I worked for a company that made IC design software.  After being there for about a year, the software was ready for testing.  It was then that we discovered tha no one on the team (even those working on the project for 3 or more years) actually knew how to design an IC.

  • l1fel1ne (unregistered) in reply to disenchanted

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Rubbish again. WTF?


    I agree... I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past couple of weeks...
    I guess everyone has become a better programmer after reading this sight and all the silly mistakes have been listed so no one will ever make a "craptastic" (captcha) function / program again!

    Or some of our lips are sealed due to non-disclosure agreements....

  • (cs) in reply to l1fel1ne
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Rubbish again. WTF?


    I agree... I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past couple of weeks...
    I guess everyone has become a better programmer after reading this sight and all the silly mistakes have been listed so no one will ever make a "craptastic" (captcha) function / program again!

    Or some of our lips are sealed due to non-disclosure agreements....


    <FONT face=Tahoma>That's why Alex anonymizes the WTF stories being submitted...



    </FONT>
  • (cs) in reply to pelee
    pelee:
    5. Foosball girl is really a guy on estrogen (everyone knows no good looking women become programmers)
    

    Let the flames begin...



    That girl isn't a developer. She just hangs out and plays foosball with the developers when they're bored. It's a cool job actually.
  • (cs) in reply to pelee
    pelee:
    JBL:
    Jake Vinson:
    • doesn't do any caching or indexing

    That's the part I really like. I suppose building a cache or index would hurt performance. Oh, wait...

    Not quite - what if the table in 'select * from [table]' changed, but it's contents had been cached on the client? Yes, I know caching should do implicit updates, but their mechanism doesn't seem to support dynamic anything (except, perhaps stupidity). Better to brute force it every time, regardless of cost in time, money, customers, sanity, .... wait, ?



    I think you're both right.  Wait... and wait, and wait, and wait...
  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:

    Simple, walk over to the DB server, remove the disk, put it on a wooden table, take a picture, scan it at HIGH resolution, display in Paint, zoom in on the bits representing the table, and voila!



    I hope we all recognize that the wooden table jokes are way past their prime.
  • Junior IT Professional (unregistered)

    I think you guys are underestimating the power of SELECT STAR!

  • (cs) in reply to pelee
    pelee:

    Ok, since so many folks seem bored with the WTF's on the main board, let's start something new:

    1. Micro$oft rules
    2. VBA rules M$
    3. AJAX *is* Web 2.0
    4. Bean Bag Girl is really only twelve, but has a great air-brusher
    5. Foosball girl is really a guy on estrogen (everyone knows no good looking women become programmers)
    

    Let the flames begin...



    Who's Bean Bag Girl?

        dZ.
  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:

    Simple, walk over to the DB server, remove the disk, put it on a wooden table, take a picture, scan it at HIGH resolution, display in Paint, zoom in on the bits representing the table, and voila!

    How does a wooden bit of a table look like?

  • Yaytay (unregistered) in reply to Hexar
    Anonymous:

    And what the crap is "space age" nylon? 

    Nylon from the 1960s and 70s, obviously.

     

    Captcha has been spending too much time thinking about the class action lawyer on the right - jiggles

  • (cs) in reply to Hexar
    Anonymous:
    GrandmasterB:

    Jake Vinson:
    Gabe shares his story of Sumo Lounge high tech beanbag furniture offers the stylish, versatile solution for modern

    This is almost the exact same story as yesterday and the day before.  Can we get something new?

    The class action ad is the best.  That old lawyer dude means business

    He reminds me of the character Christopher Lloyd played in the Back to the Future movies!

  • (cs) in reply to pelee
    pelee:

    Ok, since so many folks seem bored with the WTF's on the main board, let's start something new:

    1. Micro$oft rules
    2. VBA rules M$
    3. AJAX *is* Web 2.0
    4. Bean Bag Girl is really only twelve, but has a great air-brusher
    5. Foosball girl is really a guy on estrogen (everyone knows no good looking women become programmers)
    

    Let the flames begin...


    <font size="5">Y</font>awn...None of those even pop my cork.  You will be lucky to get a suntan with those lame topics.

  • (cs) in reply to savar
    savar:
    snoofle:

    Simple, walk over to the DB server, remove the disk, put it on a wooden table, take a picture, scan it at HIGH resolution, display in Paint, zoom in on the bits representing the table, and voila!



    I hope we all recognize that the wooden table jokes are way past their prime.

    Absolutely.  This 'joke' needs a death certificate.  I'll print one out, put it on a wooden table and take a picture.  Then I'll print the picture and scan it in.  After that, I'll post it on a web page and link to it.  In about a week and a half I should have this wrapped up and we can all be free.
  • (cs)
    Jake Vinson:
    ...
    • To support SQL Server, users must purchase Oracle Transparent Gateway for SQL Server (around $15,000 per computer)
    • Users must purchase an Oracle license (around $infinity)
    • Users will probably need duplicate servers for fault tolerance, which could run up to $100,000 plus support costs
    • They don't even have to test it before announcing it works!  I mean, if Oracle Transparent Gateway says it works, it works, right?
    ...

    With prices like that, I can predict a new version of OTG coming soon--without free upgrades.
  • Kiezkahse (unregistered) in reply to savar

    savar:

    That girl isn't a developer. She just hangs out and plays foosball with the developers when they're bored. It's a cool job actually.

    That would be "Analyst" and the downside is that she has to deal with beligerent customers/users from around the globe on behalf of her (pet) developers.  Her salary hinges on her ability to make the developers want to write software that will make the grumpy customers (relatively) happy.  Her job is based on the not-wholly-incorrect premise that when a developer is given direct access to a customer, somebody usually ends up being beaten like a pinata, and both the developer and the customer are worth more to the business than a pinata.  At my company, this produces the odd side effect of the analyst earning more than either the developer or the customer due to the benefits of hazard pay...

  • Yaytay (unregistered) in reply to Kiezkahse
    Anonymous:

    Her job is based on the not-wholly-incorrect premise that when a developer is given direct access to a customer, somebody usually ends up being beaten like a pinata, and both the developer and the customer are worth more to the business than a pinata. 

    I was sure it was based on some other premise, something to do with direct access to her...

     

     

    Where do these captchas come from?

  • (cs) in reply to R.Flowers
    R.Flowers:
    Jerry:

    Gotta love the spelling of Genius...

    Bus Raker:
    Gotta love the term 'seamless'.  It's so much more marketing than reality.

    Who is the genious that came up with 'SELECT * FROM [table]'?  You can see he only got though page 1 of the manual.


    More like an ingenious!

    No, that's not right...

    Yeah, you spelled ignoramus wrong.

  • Kram (unregistered) in reply to dasmb
    dasmb:
    Typically, getting software to work on two database platforms requires a lot of work, testing, and rework.

    I disagree. A carefully designed database abstraction layer, such as an O-R mapping tool, will get your software working on as many platforms as you like with little work, very little rework, and very straightforward testing.  You don't get the full feature set of each database, but usually who needs it?

    Of course, if you're one of the millions of morons still appending where clauses to strings...yeah, you're shit out of luck.


    Sorry to sound like a moron, but could you shed some more light on a better way to filter data other than a where clause? I know that you can use table filtering directly, is that a better method?

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