• Wodin (unregistered) in reply to CaRL
    CaRL:
    And, for more flexibility than offered by most data storage systems, you can pack several elements into that single data value, separated by your own custom delimiter.

    (You may think I'm joking, but I worked for the VP of IS in a major retail chain, and he actually did this in a lot of his tables. Sometimes he even had subdelimited values within his delimited values. And the lusers thought he was a genious. Hence the promotion to VP. True story...)

    Argh! Sounds a lot like HL7.

  • Wodin (unregistered) in reply to halcyon1234
    halcyon1234:
    Mr B:
    One comedy troll is amusing. Many comedy trolls are tedious.
    When I put together my team for a project, I make sure that there are at least four trolls, so that they can form a RAIT (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Trolls). That way they provide both maximum troll-uptime AND maximum troll-backups. I also ensure that the same four trolls are assigned to multiple projects, so that they can more efficiently use their spare troll-cycles.
    What RAIT level do you use? 10 or 6 or 5 and a hot spare?

    By the way, another definition of RAIT is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Tapes:

    http://www.fmepnet.org/rait_notes.html http://wiki.zmanda.com/man/amanda-devices.7.html#id261048

  • (cs) in reply to Chris B.
    Chris B.:
    ASCII also has such terrifically under used codes as <BELL> to ring the bell on the teletype, <LF> to return the print head carriage back to the beginning of the line, and cool and useful winners like <VT> vertical tab.
    <LF> is used heavily, at the end of every line of every plain text file on nearly every computer sold for decades. (Well, except for old IBMs, who rejected ASCII, and old Macs, which used <CR>.) That's even true of MS-DOS/Windows systems, though they like to put <CR> first.

    Strictly though, your description is wrong. It is <CR> that is supposed to put the print head carriage back to the beginning of the name (hence the name “Carriage Return”). <LF> is a “Line Feed” and tells the platen roller to move the paper up by one line.

    For sheer abuse potential, <ESC>. Thankfully Unix utilities like /bin/ls have been patched over the years so the full potential for havoc is lessened to when I first saw it done to me. (Doing an 'ls' is not supposed to print a scrolling message in your xterm title bar!)

  • Mr. Mike (unregistered) in reply to MidCod3r

    I remember when I was in grade school, there were certain guys who would tell lies. They were good actors and would tell their tall tales in a very convincing way. Looking back, it seems like the payoff wasn't the self-aggrandizement that such lying would offer, but rather, it was the feeling of superiority they seemed to derive from manipulating and humiliating someone gullible enough to believe their bullshit. It always seemed to me to be a very cruel impulse and, after falling prey to them a few times myself, I wanted to bash their heads into the concrete. But I outgrew that impulse; an adaptation trollers never seem to learn.

    I mean, how emotionally immature do you have to be to come to a board like this with the set intent of tricking people into arguing with you? It's astonishing to think of the time and energy you would have to devote to this practice only to get a few moments of sadistic pleasure.

    Grow the f*** up and get a life already! You only make yourself look ridiculous.

  • SubSubDelimit (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    We know you're not joking; that kind of "design" has already been involved in more than one WTF here. Although, subdelimiting them sounds like a heretofore unexplored idiocy.

    Hm, ever tried to parse EDIFACT messages? They do sub-subdelimitin. As does LDAP to some extent. Sigh.

  • (cs) in reply to halcyon1234
    halcyon1234:
    Mr B:
    One comedy troll is amusing. Many comedy trolls are tedious.
    When I put together my team for a project, I make sure that there are at least four trolls, so that they can form a RAIT (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Trolls). That way they provide both maximum troll-uptime AND maximum troll-backups. I also ensure that the same four trolls are assigned to multiple projects, so that they can more efficiently use their spare troll-cycles.
    I know i shouldn't find that acronym funny...but i do.
  • (cs) in reply to Mr. Mike
    Mr. Mike:
    I mean, how emotionally immature do you have to be to come to a board like this with the set intent of tricking people into arguing with you? It's astonishing to think of the time and energy you would have to devote to this practice only to get a few moments of sadistic pleasure.

    Grow the f*** up and get a life already! You only make yourself look ridiculous.

    I'm sorry, but what else would the purpose of having comments on a website dedicated to perversions in IT, but to make jokes and satire of misconceptions we see played out repeatedly.

    (Ok I'm hoping this was actually a troll I tripped over, but I couldn't detect even the faintest sarcasm, unless being serious AT all on TDWTF counts! Suppose it could)

  • (cs)

    I do this (have a DateID field connecting to a dateDimension table) all the time in my data-warehouse applications.

    It makes good sense, the DateDimension table (which gets the latest date added each day by the way), contains columns for Year+Month (200812), year+week (200852) financial year, weekday/weekend, bankholiday. It's very much quicker that performing various date functions on millions of records. Mostly the ACTUAL time isn't important, it's the day or sometimes the hour which is of interest. If the actual time, i.e. down to the millisecond IS important, then the same principle applies but the dimension table would be bigger.

    One of the main principles behind Datawarehousing is that on the whole, the data is a read-only snapshot, and so copes well with being pre-prepared in one big process, so that queries on it can be performed at optimal speed. You can do things that don't make sense in OLTP, when the data is first of all usually smaller and also constantly updating.

  • Fred (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Sounds a lot like the typical "holiday" table around here...

    Happy Holidays to all !!!

    Around here, the holiday table has a country/state id field: required if you do any work out of state. Also, the holiday table only has holidays in it: if the date is not in the holiday table, it's not a holiday: the table never runs out of dates.

    The 'accounting period' table is more of a problem. There are a variable number of 'accounting periods' in a year, and the start and end points can be anywhere. Dates that aren't in an 'accounting period' return null for the 'accounting period', and the end-of-period reports don't work correctly, but the totals are correct, and the period-total values can be derived, or reported on date instead of period.

  • meta cod3r (unregistered) in reply to Mr B

    I'm the CEO of a major discussion forum company, and I require all my employees to be comedy trolls.

  • Jesse Bethke (unregistered)

    You can design your table so that it will automatically populate itself as needed. Just in case no one remembers the date issue 10 years from now.

    http://blog.jessebethke.com/web_dev/database/automatic-population-of-the-time-dimension-for-an-olap-cube/

  • Larry (unregistered) in reply to Fred

    Here we have to deal with not only country but also specific market holidays. Also we may need to have a holiday for a trade and one for then it actually settles. So what did we do? We have multiple "calendars" in the database outlining holidays. Then we simply assign a market to the calendar. It works since really there are only about four calendars total we need in this system. We automatically exclude weekends too.

    We have another system(third party) where you have to actually declare weekends as holidays. We also discovered the system can only hold two years of holidays at most...

    I don't understand why you'd not setup your dates table to be the exclusions for what is a valid day and why it seems so hard for some people to calculate a weekend.

  • WP (unregistered) in reply to ChrisSamsDad

    ChrisSamsDad, there is a site you may be interested in. Point your browswer at:

    www.parents-centre.org.uk

    Sorry if this post is against forum rules, it's just that I've been trying to find CSD on the net for some time now!

    WP

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