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Admin
Do note, I am hamming up the character of Mr. AHole DBA Alpha Nerd but yes, a lot of us do exist and I find myself in that crowd too.
NOW TO DRINK MORE DEVELOPER TEARS!!!!
Admin
You definitely need a water bottle with that label.
Admin
Data is the most important to a business. Everything else can be bought, rewritten or otherwise reacquired. But your data is YOUR data and cannot be sourced elsewhere.
Admin
Problem solving is a shared skill.
Therefore, everything else is domain knowledge and can be learned.
The VAST majority of the problem in development (DBA or programmer), has to do with:
Once you have setup good access to good information, you can learn the domain knowledge and work your way up to skillfulness.
For anyone that doesn't have the knowledge of those two problems (researching, and knowing bad knowledge exists and how to identify it), they will never get past horrible, and be a pain in the neck for everyone else.
Now, a problem that cannot be avoided, is when there is a strong consensus from your source of knowledge that is just plain wrong. If you hit one of those, you could be using a bad technique for years, or your whole life.
But the biggest problem I see here on both sides of this debate...
<<<< EGO >>>>
It's just too dang big to avoid tripping over yourselves. Some good curt honesty will work towards reaching a common ground.
There are bad DBAs, bad developers, and just plain bad workers, on all sides of this ridiculous fence. Get over it.
Admin
FTFY
Admin
The post is chock-full-o WTFs even for those of us with the IQs of a slug. But please explain how you can get fired for applying an operator to the entire table, but not for applying it to a (possibly insufficient) subset?
Because 60% of the WTFs reside in the original code. Magic numbers, horrendously bad design for a stored proc, a hidden race condition, treating more than one match the same as no matches.
"Just a developer" did a pretty good job of reverse engineering the bad behavior of the original code, with the exception that:
(1) the original proc will stop counting whenever multiple records have the same user number, since it treats multiple matches the same way as no matches (2) the replacement proc sets an upper bound on the user number, which means it will stop counting once a record with that user number is created (3) the faster version of the stored procedure may expose the race condition that had been masked before ("bring back the while, just start at a higher magic number, please!", (4) even the uber-smart DBA code reviewer didn't notice that the new code fails when no records exist with a user number in that range
The CAPTCHA says it all: nulla
Admin
Admin
I'd say that #2 isn't the majority of the issue, simply because bad programmers do not do research.
Admin
Some copy nonsense from Stack Overflow. (There's a lot of good stuff on Stack Overflow, but there's a lot of users who can't distinguish the good stuff from the bad.)
The programmer of Sony's rootkit even knew that OSR would be a good place to go to ask someone to pls send teh codes.
Admin
Those are the ones that I would consider slightly above the bottom of the barrel. They are smart enough to do research, they just do it poorly and blindly.
Admin
Do sequences not exist in T SQL? Oracle dev here.
Admin
"sigh".
Ugh... A good portion of the SQL Server "DBA" people I've worked with did not know about scope identity, and promoted "select max(id)+1" as the 'proper' way to do it. When I'd point as (as just a 'developer') the notion of race conditions and select max() being hacky and error prone, I'd get a nice pat on the head and told to go back to my code.
Maddening...
Same people that didn't understand the need for pagination in an app, and promoted crappy stored procedure hacks full of select top() BS to get the middle 50 rows out of 20,000 results. But hey, wtf, it's 'enterprise', right? No one expects it to be efficient...