ita, may I suggest that you punch New Guy. It will make you feel better, just on principle.

It's actually a file dump (files referred to in the records) they made based on a query I wrote over a month ago. I fixed the query since then, but it took them a month to extract the files, so there's no way they can re-run their end in time. I'm hoping my initial query was sufficiently a superset (I could run the numbers and check, but I'm askeered, which means I'll do it tomorrow) to mean it won't be a big deal.

Goddamned parentheses and word wrap.

And, uh, me.

ita, may I suggest that you punch New Guy

Can I? Pretty please?

ita, I mean what brand of database server? MS SQL Server? Oracle?

Just curious....

Muppet Madness tournament: [link]

who the hell is "telly monster"?

ita, I mean what brand of database server? MS SQL Server? Oracle?

Oh, sorry. Details, details. Oracle 10g. Why?

Oracle 10g. Why?

Just curious. Our biggest client uses Oracle and MS SQL Server. All our stuff is on SQL Server, and the SQL Server database interfaces with Oracle.

My boss has been complaining for ages to our big client how much the stuff they write for Oracle sucks, so they finally gave him direct access to the Oracle server (so he can write queries directly) instead of them just giving us certain views.

My boss will say stuff like, "This Oracle query takes two hours to run. There's no way a query should take that long. I bet you I could write a query that does the same thing in three minutes."

I'm surprised they don't feel insulted by him sometimes. But he's usually right.

Sophia, one of the first things I had to do when I started the job I'm in a couple of years ago was fire a student intern that had been a problem for our department for several years. This was especially hard, because I had been working with her all those years in another position in the department, and I was suddenly her supervisor. One of the first things my supervisor said to me when I got the promotion was, "I want her out; I want her gone." At first I resented it, because it was something she hadn't asked my predecessor to take on, just like she hadn't asked my predecessor to take our contractors head-on the way she asked me to from the get-go. But maybe my predecessor wasn't as visibly outraged as I was with their performance either, idk.

Anyway, it took a lot of rearranging of my personality to become the confrontational beast that I had to become that first year in the new job, but ultimately, firing the student intern felt great.

That sounds harsh, but I realized that all of the times that she lied to us and didn't show and said she was doing stuff but wasn't, she was giving us the metaphorical finger, and she had no respect for us, and it was a huge relief to just acknowledge that. Not start a fight with her, but just get her lack of respect out in the open, and put an end to it.

Not to say your situation is precisely the same, (our intern didn't have an end date coming up in less than two months, for instance) but I tend to dread not confronting that kind of thing more than confronting it, nowadays.

From the Jan 1, 1944 issue of Life: A Squirrel's Guide to Fashion

Tommy Tucker was a squirrel adopted by a woman in Washington, DC, in the early 1940s after she found the critter orphaned in a tree. He soon became part of the family, as it were -- accompanying the lady of the house on shopping trips, for instance. She also, it turned out, enjoyed dressing him up in specially made outfits. And so it begins ...

My boss will say stuff like, "This Oracle query takes two hours to run. There's no way a query should take that long. I bet you I could write a query that does the same thing in three minutes."

Is he writing queries directly in Oracle, or using the MSSQL interface?

I don't know crap about Oracle-specific tuning. If I were writing queries for programs, it would be different. But I'm usually just getting different looks at data, or generating lists of IDs for dumps.

Most of the places I've worked have been Oracle shops, with the rationale of scalability and diversity of OS platforms. And the vendors we've been installing the DBs as back ends for have generally recommended Oracle as their first choices.

Man, the search engine in this web app sucks. I run the query in Oracle to find the content, and then try to find the same piece in the custom portal front end to see how it's presented, and it's like I'm playing craps in Atlantic City. I don't so often win.

Ah, fuck. My boss just discovered a major mistake I made in paginating half a year's worth of manuscripts. About 20 pages now overlap. This is all on-line, no actual pages to check, since the print issues haven't gone to press yet. But it can't be re-paginated. So that's wonderful. I have no idea what they're going to do about it.

I told my boss when I was given this assignment that it wasn't a good idea to run things this way, with only one set of eyes on it. Hello, human, thus error is possible. I'm just glad we found it before I handed it off to the new guy; he shouldn't have to deal with it. Fuck.