• LZ79LRU (unregistered)

    And I bet you he didn't get so much as a pat on the back for his effort.

  • Hanzito (unregistered) in reply to LZ79LRU

    Probably the only thing he got was weekly inquiries why it took so long to make such a simple change. "Are you sure you're up for the job?" Followed by a B- evaluation, because his 1-point XS ticket took 3 months.

  • (nodebb)

    What stuns me is that Jeff was stunned by the corporation's attitude --- it looks extremely typical to me.

  • erichamion (unregistered)

    Although UNION ALL is certainly appropriate here, the issue wouldn't have occurred if each of the UNIONed queries just had a second column with a unique description. What's the point of a raw list of numbers, if there's no indication of what each number means?

  • (author) in reply to erichamion

    The submission didn't say, but my assumption is that this entire thing was a subquery in a larger query, so the context comes from that larger query. Or, since it was on a report, it may have just driven a single field, in which case, the context was on the report.

  • (nodebb)

    I expected something like "Because the report was so old, it COULDN'T be wrong, and the executives fired all the sales team anyway. It was months later they realized that the report was, in fact, wrong, but by then the damage had been done."

  • erichamion (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter

    Oh, I didn't notice the top line, SELECT SUM(subtotal) FROM <all the unioned queries, which each performs a sum itself>. So yeah, it does all collapse down into one row at the end.

  • (nodebb)

    Nothing special honestly. I had once a client long time ago that lost every year the income of a complete hour in their books because their DB didn't use UTC but some local time zone and daylight saving erased one hour every year while overwriting another one. Everyone know in the IT department, nobody in the business section wanted to even touch the topic for not "burning bridges", whatever that means in this context. My guess was that they were afraid of calling out high levels of mid management over their decade old mistake that developers had to implement after protest anyway because reasons.

  • (nodebb) in reply to erichamion

    Although UNION ALL is certainly appropriate here, the issue wouldn't have occurred if each of the UNIONed queries just had a second column with a unique description. What's the point of a raw list of numbers, if there's no indication of what each number means?

    I've worked in places where "The Report" is just a single number. No label. No description. Not even a report title. Just a number. And it means ... EVERYTHING! We had two of those: 1- Total Billed; 2- Total payments received. No detail, no "by client" breakdown. Nuttin.

    Nothing "wrong" with that, if everyone knows what the number means. Nothing "right" with it, either.

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