Things you wish you could say (everywhere)

You are supposed to be a news site, try acting like one.

  • Full recaps of last night’s crappy “reality” TV shows are not news.
  • I know accepting reader submissions is the new thing, but at least vet them first. A shaky view of a not very rough sea 200m away is not at all enthralling. Even when it is punctuated heavily by wind noise (especially when).
  • The snake was dead. A photo of it would be far better than video footage with a kid in the background commenting how creepy it is. Even a frame capture from the video would be better.
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If someone asks where a certain department in your store is, it helps if you actually finish providing directions to that department. Slowly coming to a stop in the middle of an incomplete sentence because you think the person you’re talking to doesn’t understand what you’re saying doesn’t help much. You may know that each area is marked by signs hanging from the ceiling, but most shoppers look horizontally or downward, not upward. The ones that might be looking upwards could be trying to see where the security cameras are. You kind of have to say “See the sign hanging from the ceiling?”, especially when it is over a third of the way across the store.

To every website designer that includes a search function on the page:

If the search is so interactive that it interrupts what the person is trying to search for in the middle of typing it which causes the search to report the wrong results and constantly changes with each new letter that is typed, then it’s too intrusive. Wait until they hit enter or press space to signal the conclusion of a word, and then you can run your search.

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Or, if it absolutely has to be more interactive, add a delay between pressing a key and performing the search (and I mean a decent delay of a couple of seconds, not 100 milliseconds).

Why are all of the login/register buttons on the RHS of the screen? Sometimes I am at a lower resolution machine and I have to scroll the screen over to be able to get in. Also, your screen is poorly designed and you should feel bad.

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You go to box, you feel shame.

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Slapshot. Nice.

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We moved away from 1 and 2 character variable names 30 years ago, so why do you SQL “gurus” still insist on aliases that are ridiculously short and uninformative?
select
p.schema,
d.schema

is completely useless. What is wrong with giving enough information that the person reading it doesn’t have to keep checking the “from” part to work out what you mean?
Whatever happened to the rule that you program for the next person who comes along to work on it?

Disclaimer: This is a personal bugbear and I may have ranted about it before.

Because if you’re going to use a long alias, you may as well not use the alias at all. Half the reason to use an alias is to make the query smaller and easier to read.

If there’s only one table in the query that starts with p, then p.schema is referring to that table. It’s not that difficult.

Don’t ever look at a query that’s been anonymized by SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. Your head might asplode.

Yeah, but that’s a trivial example. How often do you see things like pr.Amount, pl.Total, rl.zzz? Smaller very often makes things harder to understand, not easier.
On the other hand, something like PriceReduction.Amount is not at all hard to understand, and if you format the query properly it’s pretty easy.

If you are writing the query yourself, it’s a heck of a lot easier to remember your naming scheme than if someone is coming in behind you and trying to work out what you have done.

I was a primitive screwhead query writer, but I always used long names, and when I did create something I added my initials to it.

OTOH, a long one for me was a hundred lines.

I guess we read queries differently. I look to the FROM clause first and if I see PriceReduction aliased to PR, that looks pretty logical to me and sticks in my mind.

Does anyone here watch Silicon Valley? This is reminding me of this week’s episode where the main character has to break up with his new girlfriend because she indents with spaces instead of tabs.

I mean, who would do that?

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OMG, I would have to kill her and hang her body in a tree somewhere with a sign saying why I did it.

Having spent way too much time working in other people’s documents replying to RFPs and attempting to keep my style the same as their screwed up mangled crap I believe that doing this should be at least a flogging offense. Sometimes I just go through and reformat the whole document and set the tabs myself since I can’t match whatever disaster they’ve put together. Same documents where adding an indented bullet point somehow warps the whole document like a sprung garage door spring.

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I totally understand both sides of the argument.
He is an anal-retentive control freak who says that it decreases code size, and she argues that modern compilers ignore white space and you get better precision by using spaces.

DISCUSS

The size of spaces changes with the font point size. Tabs are set/measured on the ruler.

Unless you use a mono-space font, and I do.

Changing the pitch/point size still changes the space size

Usually if I’m looking at somebody else’s queries it’s because there’s something wrong, or because I need to change it. I am often not completely familiar with the database so abbreviations will be meaningless.
I want to be able to concentrate on what it is I have to change without getting distracted by having to translate someone else’s cryptic abbreviations.
Yes, I can look at the from statement and work it out, but why should I have to?

It is not still raining like a mofo and I’m not stuck at work at almost 7 at night with the wife sending me pictures of water in the street almost up to to top of the curb.

On the bright side, the water has never come near high enough to get into the houses on our street. Not that it couldn’t, but we’ve had some pretty heavy weather lately and been ok. That was something I checked out before I bought the house. I’ve had friends in that neighborhood since middle school and have never heard of anyone getting water in the house. Still, there is a lot of construction in the area, so it could change.