• DBA (unregistered) in reply to 35% Genius

    MSSQL added versioning (called snapshot isolation) in SQL Server 2005. It is an option that must be enabled on a database-by-database basis, because there is an overhead cost to copy every page to tempdb before updating.

  • (cs) in reply to Dirk
    Dirk:
    Can the reply button be removed for me, please? I tend to miss the quote button...

    No. It's a minimum requirement for posting here that you be able to click on the appropriate button. If you can't do so, please don't post. ;-)

  • Naren (unregistered) in reply to biziclop

    No. The paracetamol of the software industry is "Java" or more specifically "Java frameworks" (which are just like "mushrooms") :)

  • (cs) in reply to Sylencer
    Sylencer:
    The real WTF is all the comments discussing about "SQL Server" meaning the Microsoft implementation of "a" SQL Server...

    Not a WTF. SQL Server is a Microsoft product name (and is trademarked). Using "SQL Server" to mean a different RDBMS is the WTF.

  • (cs) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    Walleye:
    Outlaw Programmer:
    Stilgar:
    Dude:
    MySQL is solution

    yes but sometimes you want more power then you go for flat file

    You forget that you can just store the XML IN the MySQL DB. Infinite scalability!

    But neither a flat file or MySQL lets you exercise that most powerful of Oracle SQL commands:

    SELECT X FROM DUAL

    Actually, MySQL can do that.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that MySQL has a DUAL pseudo-table.

  • (cs) in reply to Martin
    Martin:
    Better tell that to gnu: To quote from gnu.org: <quote> SQL Server is a free portable multiuser relatational database management system. It supports the full SQL89 dialect and has some extensions from SQL92. It provides multiuser access and transaction isolation based on predicative locks. The working OS: UNIX. The working language: C . It also uses RPC, shared memory and message queues. </quote>

    Ok. Finally the real WTF from you: Citing gnu as a definitive source about anything other than gnu related codebases.

    Martin:
    While it is not normal, some people do referer to their MySql/PostgreSQL/SysDB/Oracle as simple "SQL server"

    Got it. Not only is gnu an authority on SQL Server's meaning, but so are the idiots who just decide to use the term incorrectly.

    I guess that means that if I can find a couple of people to say that you're not an idiot too, you'll think that makes it so. Or if I can find a few people who think it's fine to drink a gallon of bourbon and then drive their cars on public streets, that makes it a good idea to drink and drive.

    Just because you can find people doing something totally wrong doesn't magically make it right. It just proves they're morons if someone corrects them and they continue doing it.

    So, Martin, SQL Server does not mean MySQL or PostgreSQL or SysDB or Oracle. Got it yet? Or are you one of those people who can't learn.

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Wikipedia seems to see it my way: I believe salary qualifies as an operating cost, yes?

    I think you're now spouting nonsense in a fruitless effort to prove your point, which is wrong.

    The definition is quite easy:

    If your software is used internally and isn't marketed for sale for others to use, your developers are overhead (they don't directly help generate revenue).

    If your software is marketed for sales to someone other than your own company, your developers directly help generate revenue and therefore aren't overhead.

    Is that simple enough for you?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Naren
    Naren:
    No. The paracetamol of the software industry is "Java" or more specifically "Java frameworks" (which are just like "mushrooms") :)
    <singing> Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Framework, Framework, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, Java, X-M-L, XM-ellll...# </singing>
  • (cs) in reply to 35% Genius
    Code Dependent:
    The guys who write software couldn't write it if their computers didn't work. Therefore the electic bill generates profit. By your reasoning, then, the electric bill is not overhead.

    Technically speaking, you're quite correct. From a practical standpoint, you're a dolt.

    While it's true that the extremely small portion of the overall electric bill that powers the programmer's computers is not overhead, the remaining electricity is, and so is the salary of the person that you hire to keep track of what electricity is and isn't part of the overhead. You know, metering actual watts used by each computer on a constant basis so you can calculate the cost of those watts and deduct them from the overall electric bill so you can separate overhead and non-overhead costs.

    Of course, for non-idiot business people, it's a no-brainer to just decide to count that small percentage of power against the overhead costs in order to avoid the much higher costs associated with the accounting and tracking of the comparatively small amount used by the PCs.

    Of course, I can see you sitting at the side of a developer's desk, staring intently at the wall outlet. Dolt.

  • Mizchief (unregistered)

    I had a marketing/sales guy at a company I worked for go at least a full year telling customers that we had a seperate backup "sequel" server. He had no Idea that our SQL Server was a database engine because he though "sequel" ment that it was a "second" server, and SQL was an abbreviation of the word "sequel"

    His ignorance came to light one day duing a company meeting where we were trying to find ways to cut costs, and he suggested that shutdown our "sequel" server and force our customers to use their own backup tools. I promptly suggested that we do a company wide employee evaluation to weed out the incompetent.

  • rec (unregistered) in reply to jspenguin
    jspenguin:
    metrician:
    Just for the record, CDR is an abbreviation for Call Detail Record not Call Data Record.

    That's funny, I thought it meant "Contents of Decrement Register".

    I thought it meant Compact Disc Recordable

  • (cs) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    Dolt.
    Well, Ken, everybody's a dolt in your world, and your only known means of interaction with others is through insult, so that a put-down from you is about the same as a "good morning" from anyone else.

    But it does give me warm fuzzies that you notice me. :)

  • Mr. (unregistered) in reply to Mizchief
    Mizchief:
    I had a marketing/sales guy at a company I worked for go at least a full year telling customers that we had a seperate backup "sequel" server. He had no Idea that our SQL Server was a database engine because he though "sequel" ment that it was a "second" server, and SQL was an abbreviation of the word "sequel"

    When my company started to shere some data with XML, they put a non-technical person to be the first contact with our customers... I heard the say "And if you want to access our data, we have made something called XML"

  • (cs) in reply to Schnapple
    Schnapple:
    DWalker59:
    The SQL 2005 Express engine (without a user interface) is free (just like MySQL). There are third-party user interfaces for it.

    Actually, SQL 2005 Express comes with a UI as well - the same one, basically, as the real product. MSDE (the "Express" analogue for SQL 2000) didn't come with one but I've actually used SQL 2005 Express for clients before. It has some technical limitations (most notably a max 2GB database size) and some usage restrictions, but it can be used for commercial purposes.

    You're right, I was wrong. I don't use the Express version, and I thought it lacked a usable user-interface management tool. A few people have corrected me on that.

    The 2 GB file size limit on Express might be plenty for some small businesses, and if not, they can spend the $700 to buy the Standard version.

  • (cs) in reply to magi
    magi:
    DWalker59:
    The SQL 2005 Express engine (without a user interface) is free (just like MySQL).
    I don't think so.

    I do think so. In fact, I know so. It even has a user interface, as several people have pointed out. It can be used in a commercial environment for production use.

  • (cs) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    DWalker59:
    The SQL 2005 Express engine (without a user interface) is free (just like MySQL). There are third-party user interfaces for it.

    Except that the Express license is more restrictive I'd imagine. If you're going to use a faceless DB solution and you don't need any Visual Studio integration, go with MySQL.

    You're probably imagining wrong. SQL Server Express can be used in a production, corporate environment, for example. And it's not faceless.

  • (cs) in reply to Dave G.
    Dave G.:
    Code Dependent:
    So for about three hours per day, by your formula, a developer is overhead.

    This is a bit tricker, but the real question is - does it help the accounting process to go into this much detail? The answer is most certainly no, and it would be impossible to do anyway.

    You can charge employees times between different projects - eg one project for 5 hours and another in 3 hours - but you wouldn't go down to the level "well this is a meeting, so its overhead.. but the other time he wrote some code, so it's a production cost". You'd say they were production costs and be done with it.

    I agree with you, Dave, that it is neither desirable nor possible. But then, I'm not an accountant. Both my present and previous employers attempt to track things on this level. The previous wanted an accounting of our (developers') time in 15 minute increments. It was ridiculous, of course, and we generally ended up making hazy guesses at the end of the day to flesh out our activities record. My present employer isn't that anal, but we still use software to track time usage, with various "buckets" that an activity will go into. And there are buckets for team and departmental meetings; yes, they keep those separate from project activity, and from each other.

  • (cs) in reply to Nerf Herder
    Nerf Herder:
    TimmyT:
    I'm curious, I've never worked on Oracle before, but have done lots of SQL work including clustering and replication - can anyone tell me from a unbiased DBA/systems engineer perspective why Oracle is better than SQL? All I can think of is maybe Solaris is a little more stable than a properly configured and hardened Windows server. I don't care about marketing or end user perception, I want the truth!

    Any comments like "cuz oracal is teh best dood" will be deleted from my temporary tables...

    Oracle doesn't require Windows to run.

    Also locks are not precious commodities like they are in SQL Server (aka writers don't block readers in Oracle). Transactions take as long as they need, and other sessions are not blocked while someone updates the tables. In my opinion this is one of the single best reasons to stay far away from MS.

    Not to sound like a shill for MS, but.... writes don't block reads in MY installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Tables don't get locked in their entirety; there are row-level and page-level locks. And when updates are fast, any blocking that might occur is very short-lived.

  • (cs) in reply to vr602
    vr602:
    mstum:
    [quote user="Code Dependent

    How did you get a wooden table into your database?...

    create table wooden (<column><type>....) go

    Nay, good sir. Here is the syntax.

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Dave G.:
    Code Dependent:
    So for about three hours per day, by your formula, a developer is overhead.

    This is a bit tricker, but the real question is - does it help the accounting process to go into this much detail? The answer is most certainly no, and it would be impossible to do anyway.

    You can charge employees times between different projects - eg one project for 5 hours and another in 3 hours - but you wouldn't go down to the level "well this is a meeting, so its overhead.. but the other time he wrote some code, so it's a production cost". You'd say they were production costs and be done with it.

    I agree with you, Dave, that it is neither desirable nor possible. But then, I'm not an accountant. Both my present and previous employers attempt to track things on this level. The previous wanted an accounting of our (developers') time in 15 minute increments. It was ridiculous, of course, and we generally ended up making hazy guesses at the end of the day to flesh out our activities record. My present employer isn't that anal, but we still use software to track time usage, with various "buckets" that an activity will go into. And there are buckets for team and departmental meetings; yes, they keep those separate from project activity, and from each other.
    I'm dismayed to find myself on the same side of an argument as KenW, and I'd like to be 100% with you on this, but I'm afraid I can't be.

    Your original argument was that a salaried employee was ipso facto "overhead." It's a bit much to shift gears down to the level where you're counting things in warm fuzzy fifteen-minute intervals.

    Quoting from Wikipedia and the free online dictionary (again with an online dictionary? We've been here before) is not remotely definitive, either. Selective, most definitely. Indicative, possibly. Not definitive.

    Outside the bounds of sophistry, most people would agree that "overhead" is an accountancy device and that we should therefore defer to the accountancy viewpoint on its meaning. That meaning may only be precise in terms of individual accounting practices, but it's a tight enough one for everyday use by the rest of us slobs.

    If there's a statistical probability that what you do is contributing to a specific revenue earner, you are not "overhead." Anally retentive dingbats who count in fifteens because they have genetic defects like three feet, three hands, and only half a brain can safely be left out of the discussion.

    Mind you, I once worked at a place where management insisted on such a system. They got the head of testing to write it for them. He was ex-Navy. He used VB4. I don't know what it is with these Navy types, but they sure like buttons -- big shiny buttons and little teeny drab buttons and everything in between; you couldn't even see an entry box without pressing several buttons. There were no drop-down lists or combo boxes; just buttons. The damn thing sprouted several more buttons every week. I swear it grew an extra button or two even while I was using it.

    Of course, at the end of the month, management just threw away all the gibberish collected through this monstrosity and made up the figures to match targets required to meet their bonus schedule, just as they had done since time immemorial.

    Perhaps we can agree on the concept of "button overhead?"

  • (cs) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Perhaps we can agree on the concept of "button overhead?"
    This "overhead" discussion has grown into far more than I would have imagined. I'm not hotly defending a position, as I thought would surely be clear when I quoted apparently opposing definitions of the term (one which includes salary and one which specifically excludes "labor"; i.e., salary).

    I really don't care how "overhead" is defined. I've always understood it to mean "operating costs", period. And as I mentioned before, I'm not an accountant, so if the accountants draw a finer line than that, I have no objection; I'm willing to accept it. Yawn.

    I'm not sure why some of the respondents got all emotional about it, either. Strange behavior on here, sometimes.

    By the way, the IT department (which consisted of the manager, four developers and one hardware guy) was the only one required to track time that way. Upper management liked to have observable results for their labor, and I guess it rankled that we would be sitting typing away for months and them not have evidence of anything getting done. A couple of us wrote (in VB6!) a win32 app that tracked our time. It even had a fancy-schmancy icon in the taskbar tray. Writing it was fun. Using it was not.

    So in our case, I guess it was "tray icon overhead".

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    OP:
    the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in

    Ancillary: And if that server goes down while real time records are streaming by and you miss a record or two, or thousands?

    How the frack is that relevant? Running Oracle imbues the server with invulnerability?
  • Dave (unregistered)

    I ran into a similar situation some years ago, the customer had this nice shiny Oracle database and really, really wanted to use it for the project we were involved with. Only problem was there wasn't anything that could be (sensibly) stored in a database. However, they were quite insistent that the project use their Oracle database.

    In the end we shipped them a database containing a single table, and that table contained a single entry, which was a blob that stored the config file for the project. They were happy because they were using an Oracle Database(tm) to run things, and that had to be a good thing.

  • (cs) in reply to Sylencer
    Sylencer:
    The real WTF is all the comments discussing about "SQL Server" meaning the Microsoft implementation of "a" SQL Server...
    Consider that a 'win' for Microsoft Marketing.
  • (cs) in reply to Xeron
    Xeron:
    metrician:
    Just for the record, CDR is an abbreviation for Call Detail Record not Call Data Record.
    Not its not! Its Compact Disc Recordable!
    Or Committed Data Rate for network wonks.
  • NNicol (unregistered)

    Speaking as a Marketing guy who works with engineers on a regular basis. When it comes to buzz words like your Oracle brand, customers don't necessarily know its functionality. All they know is what people tell them. They assume the best option for the job is the bigger brand name. Like Sony is the best in everything they make right!lol needtoknowbasisforbusiness.blogspot.com

  • (cs) in reply to Walleye
    35% Genius:
    Oracle uses versioning. If you read from a table that is updated by someone else but not yet commited, your query will return the old values from before the update.

    Just like PostgreSQL in fact. (At a fraction of the price).

    Walleye:
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that MySQL has a DUAL pseudo-table.

    Who said anything about a pseudo table?

    The original comment was that only Oracle can do 'SELECT X FROM DUAL'.

    In fact, any SQL server (generic term) can do that:

    CREATE TABLE DUAL (X INTEGER); SELECT X FROM DUAL;

    There, done.

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to Dhericean
    Dhericean:
    Mark:
    The real WTF is not storing the CDRs. In some (maybe all) jurisdictions that is like throwing away money if the customer ever decided to dispute the bill.
    I feel the need to ask if you actually read the item? It specifically said that this was a separate parsing of the CDRs and nothing to do with the phone bill calculation - they were having to parse them separately because they were (understandably) not being let anywhere near the billing tables.

    OK, got it. I completely misread the second and third paragraphs.

  • Shill (unregistered) in reply to pscs
    pscs:
    35% Genius:
    Oracle uses versioning. If you read from a table that is updated by someone else but not yet commited, your query will return the old values from before the update.

    Just like PostgreSQL in fact. (At a fraction of the price).

    Walleye:
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that MySQL has a DUAL pseudo-table.

    Who said anything about a pseudo table?

    The original comment was that only Oracle can do 'SELECT X FROM DUAL'.

    In fact, any SQL server (generic term) can do that:

    CREATE TABLE DUAL (X INTEGER); SELECT X FROM DUAL;

    There, done.

    No, Oracle can't do that. But then Oracle is a database, not an SQL server, so your statement stands I suppose.

  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    alegr:
    Ben4jammin:
    It would be like if I chastised my mechanic over the type of oil he put in my truck or something. There is a reason why he works on trucks and I work on servers.

    Mechanics at Tustin Toyota put cheap generic green antifreeze into my Toyota, instead of Toyota pink red antifreeze. I wonder how many engines are ruined by that.

    Most likely, none. I've used "generic green" anti-freeze in my Toyota for 6 years with no ill consequences. Sometimes during the summer I even use *gasp* distilled water with a cleaning additive. Anti-freeze is a coolant: ethylene glycol + water; it's not rocket science and there's likely little difference in the Toyota brand other than the coloring they add.

    If you think you need Genuine Toyota anti-freeze, then you're as dumb as the marketing types in this article who think they need Oracle at all costs.

    I worked in a garage for two years in high school - green, orange, yellow, and red coolants are in fact incompatible chemically. Green is standard cheapo, as I recall red is toyota's long-life coolant, yellow is ford's long-life, and orange is some other company's long-life. Do not mix them, but if you drain all your coolant out, say, while replacing the radiator or just as part of a system flush, you can put whichever one you want in afterwards. Just don't ever mix them.

  • Willllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll (unregistered) in reply to Jake Grey
    Jake Grey:
    Is the fact that this company's marketing department has power and influence at least equal to the people who actually create the product that is the company's raison d'etre still unusual enough to count as a proper WTF?
    Not if you want a large, faceless corporation to take you seriously. Why? Because users who have heard of Oracle most likely recognise the name as belonging to an industry giant, a huge multinational corporation with a history dating back to the dawn of computing itself (whether this is true or not, this is what users, and particularly CEOs, associate with Oracle). Having "Oracle" somewhere on the box links your product to that history. If users have even heard of MySQL it's probably as a new upstart, with no history and mainly as the domain of hackers. No CEO worth their salt is going to want anything to do with it.

    In summary; the sociopaths that constitute upper management don't have the time or inclination to understand anything in detail; they only want a 5-minute presentation if it comes with pictures. But they have to approve all the spends. So to sell a solution you have to cram all the good bits into tiny soundbites and fit them all into 5 minutes. Look at low-end advertising; it's all about branding ("Oracle"), vague assertions ("reliable"), and buzzwords ("enterprise"). And if it doesn't cost a lot, it can't be worth buying.

  • chetan (unregistered)

    i have install my pc win detective so my pc is slow working pls tell how to uninstall windetective

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