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  • Is there a place where I see the popular opinion of developers?

    - by User1
    I really want to know popular opinion on controversial programming topics. Questions like: Why do some people prefer vi over emacs (or vice versa)? Is Java faster than C++? Is Intel faster than AMD? It seems SO discourages such conversions because of potential flamewars. So where do people go to discuss such matters? I'm especially interested in venues where people can "up vote" good comments and good questions.

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  • Swap files in Cloud Infrastructures

    - by ffeldhaus
    At our company we set up an OpenStack Cloud and are currently creating internal guidelines for creation of OS templates / images. One controversial topic was if we should provide swap inside the VM templates. Therefore I'd like to ask the following questions From an elastic Cloud provider point of view, does it make sense to offer swap partitions / files in the VM templates or is swap not needed when a VM can be resized? Which scenarios necessarily demand a swap file to be present? What kind of Storage should be used for swap files (e.g. local / central, FC / iSCSI / NFS)? Are there any best practices for offering swap files in a performant way in Cloud Infrastructures?

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  • VoteCounts: bookmarklet to display up/down votes even for rep<1k

    - by SztupY
    Screenshot / Code Snippet About This small bookmarklet will allow anyone to use the "vulnerability" of the API that it allows you to check the up/down vote count - a feat you could normally achieve by being a 1k+rep user. Mainly useful for sites where you don't have this amount of rep, but want to check the stats of the more controversial questions (usually on meta) No API key is actually used here, but it's trivial to add one. License I don't think a code like this deserves anything other than WTFPL Download It's the following line (javascript - 375 bytes): javascript:(function(){a='jsonp';c=' .vote-count-post';d='up_vote_count';e='down_vote_count';$.ajax({url:document.location.href.replace(/(http:\/\/)(.*)(\/questions\/.*)\/.*/,'$1api.$2/1.0$3'),dataType:a,jsonp:a,success:function(x){b=x.questions[0];$('#question'+c).html(b[d]+"-"+b[e]);$.each(b.answers,function(z,y){$('#answer-'+y.answer_id+c).html(y[d]+"-"+y[e])})}})})() EDIT: This is longer, but it will make the result look like exactly on SO. Took a while to make it exactly 508 chars, so it works with IE too. javascript:(function(){w=function(t,q){l='_vote_count';h='up'+l;j='down'+l;k='</div>';s='<div style="color:';$(t).html(s+'green">'+(q[h]?'+':'')+q[h]+k+'<div class="vote-count-separator">'+k+s+'maroon">'+(q[j]==0?'':'-')+q[j]+k)};a='jsonp';c=' .vote-count-post';$.ajax({url:document.location.href.replace(/(http:\/\/)(.*)(\/questions\/.*)\/.*/,'$1api.$2/1.0$3'),dataType:a,jsonp:a,success:function(x){b=x.questions[0];w('#question'+c,b);$.each(b.answers,function(z,y){w('#answer-'+y.answer_id+c,y)})}})})() Platform For any jquery/bookmarklets compatible browser. Tested with Chrome, FF3.6 and IE8 for SU,SO,MSO Contact sztupy.hu Code It was written in notepad already in minified form. Used firebug to debug. Code is above. Contribute(=decrease code size or make the output nicer) any way you want. I'd be great if you'd do the second code shorter than 508 bytes. Known bugs If a question has more than 30 answers then some of the answers won't be resolved. This can be solved easily for <=100 answers, but for questions with more than 100 answers this is more difficult EDIT: updated to API version 1.0. Answers doesn't work yet.

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  • Daylight Saving Time Visualized

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    When you map out the Daylight Saving Time adjusted sunrise and sunset times over the course of the year, an interesting pattern emerges. Chart designer Germanium writes: I tried to come up with the reason for the daylight saving time change by just looking at the data for sunset and sunrise times. The figure represents sunset and sunrise times thought the year. It shows that the daylight saving time change marked by the lines (DLS) is keeping the sunrise time pretty much constant throughout the whole year, while making the sunset time change a lot. The spread of sunrise times as measured by the standard deviation is 42 minutes, which means that the sunrise time changes within that range the whole year, while the standard deviation for the sunset times is 1:30 hours. Whatever the argument for doing this is, it’s pretty clear that reason is to keep the sunrise time constant. You can read more about the controversial history of Daylight Saving Time here. Daylight Saving Time Explained [via Cool Infographics] 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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  • Repairing The Visual Studio 2012 UI

    - by Ken Cox [MVP]
    I have sympathy for ‘Softies who don’t like the controversial ‘Metro’ UI changes but are afraid to say so. After all, who wants to commit a CLM (Career-Limiting Move) by declaring that the Emperor has no clothes (or gradients) and that ALL CAPS IN MENUS ARE DUMB? Talk about power! Here’s a higher-up (anyone got a name?) who has enforced a flat, monochrome, uninteresting user interface in Visual Studio 2012  that has been damned with faint praise by consumers. The pushback must have been enormous. Some ‘Softies disengage from the raging debate with, “It’s not my decision” while others feebly point out that the addition of some colour pixels in the icons is a real improvement over the beta version. True, I guess. With the UI pretty much locked, its down to repairing the damage. Fortunately, some Empire dissident has leaked the news to a blogger that  those SHOUTING CAPs aren’t hardcoded afterall: How To Prevent Visual Studio 2012 ALL CAPS Menus And so it goes. By RTM, I’m sure there will be many more add-ons to help us ‘de-Metro’ VS 2012 and recreate our favourite Visual Studio 2010 themes for it.

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  • 5 Ways Microsoft Can Improve the Windows 8 Start Screen

    - by Matt Klein
    After having used Windows 8 over the past few months, we’ve found a few ways Microsoft could immediately improve the Start Screen to make it less disorienting and more usable, not only for tablets but desktops and laptops as well. It’s safe to say that the one thing Windows 8 doesn’t lack is criticism. Since the Consumer Preview debuted in February, it has proven to be one of the most polarizing Windows releases ever. But regardless of whether you love or hate it, Windows 8 is where Microsoft’s venerable operating system is headed. Portable computing is here to stay and if the company is to survive, let alone remain relevant, it has to change, adapt, embrace, and extend. Perhaps the single most universally controversial change to Windows is Microsoft’s decision to remove the Start button (or orb, if you’ve moved beyond XP) and with it, what we know to be the Start Menu. In their place we now have a Start hot corner (a workable alternative) and the newly redesigned Metro Start Screen. The Start Screen is, if nothing else, different. Beyond a doubt, there has not been such a radical redesign of Windows’ Start functionality since it went to a two-column design with a nested “All Programs” menu in Windows XP. The Start Screen can be a little jarring because it requires users to not only relearn what they’ve known for nearly two decades but to also rethink the way they interact with Windows. However, the Start Screen maintains its core elements: a Start “menu”, a place for all installed programs (All apps), and a search pane. The Start Screen is attractive, clean, bold, and very imperfect. Here are five changes we’d like to see in the Start Screen before Windows 8 goes gold … How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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  • Career opportunities for mid-20 .Net developer

    - by Valera Kolupaev
    Recently, I have moved to Toronto and started exploring career opportunities here. My first impressions about .net developer/architect career are really controversial. Here options that comes to my mind right now: Grow as a developer, lead and solution architect in large and well-known company, like Logitech or IBM. Doing .net development medium size (10-30) software shops Joining some start-up guys First one, seems very bureaucratic with kills all programming fun, that is such valuable to me. And there is not a lot of start ups, that are based on MS technology stack. Good mid-size company seems like a best fit to me, since I can have a lot of fun, doing new projects. Previously I have been working at large (5000+) outsourcing provider as a .Net developer. I was kind of a 'vanilla' time, because our team were always doing massive scale projects from scratch, on latest .Net stack. I would really appreciate if you share pros and cons of path, that you have chosen and what you value most in your current project. I'll start: Pros for Mid-size You are really close to business and application consumers, without all bureaucratic papers Cons It seems, that career oportunities of vertical growth is rather limited, once I have to switch to my own company or join development team of some big players.

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  • What makes a person contribute to opensource? [duplicate]

    - by Jibin
    This question already has an answer here: Why develop free, open source programs? [closed] 14 answers I know this is controversial, but.. There are many great projects like Apache Webserver or Hadoop provided by the OpenSource Community. I often feel that the people that actually benefit (financially), from these projects are developers like me, sitting in India, working for MNCs, who has never contributed anything to any opensource project so far, but earn handsomely due to my basic googling skills & the community provided documentation. Is it fair ? I mean no other industry in the world face such dilemma.Those who work get paid. I mean I almost am starting to feel guilty of taking such advantage of some thing that I contribute nothing to. I had to do projects every semester in college (we could choose projects) & I used to enjoy coding then. I want to contribute. But contributing to opensource is not a task [unlike college or office work]. And life is so busy .. Are all these opensource contributors really jobless ?[just kidding..] Could someone please share some personal experiences on how you guys started contributing or any advice on why I should contribute or what attitude in life makes you keep aside time or is it that you just crazly love writing code or is it that you just love to see your name in the contributors list or do you have a local coding group you hang out with ? Do you feel I am destined to do this ? This is my part of contributing back to the world ? Whats that basic mentality that make you guys want to contribute, while I just want to finish my work and go home. What makes you guys tick ?

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  • What do you wish language designers paid attention to?

    - by Berin Loritsch
    The purpose of this question is not to assemble a laundry list of programming language features that you can't live without, or wish was in your main language of choice. The purpose of this question is to bring to light corners of languge design most language designers might not think about. So, instead of thinking about language feature X, think a little more philisophically. One of my biases, and perhaps it might be controversial, is that the softer side of engineering--the whys and what fors--are many times more important than the more concrete side. For example, Ruby was designed with a stated goal of improving developer happiness. While your opinions may be mixed on whether it delivered or not, the fact that was a goal means that some of the choices in language design were influenced by that philosophy. Please do not post: Syntax flame wars (I could care less whether you use whitespace [Python], keywords [Ruby], or curly braces [Java, C/C++, et. al.] to denote program blocks). That's just an implementation detail. "Any language that doesn't have feature X doesn't deserve to exist" type comments. There is at least one reason for all programming languages to exist--good or bad. Please do post: Philisophical ideas that language designers seem to miss. Technical concepts that seem to be poorly implemented more often than not. Please do provide an example of the pain it causes and if you have any ideas of how you would prefer it to function. Things you wish were in the platform's common library but seldom are. One the same token, things that usually are in a common library that you wish were not. Conceptual features such as built in test/assertion/contract/error handling support that you wish all programming languages would implement properly--and define properly. My hope is that this will be a fun and stimulating topic.

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  • With the outcome of the Oracle vs Google trial, does that mean Mono is now safe from Microsoft [closed]

    - by Evan Plaice
    According to the an article on ArsTechnica the judge of the case ruled that APIs are not patent-able. He referred to the structure of modules/methods/classes/functions as being like libraries/books/chapters. To patent an API would be putting a patent on thought itself. It's the internal implementations that really matter. With that in mind, Mono (C# clone for Linux/Mac) has always been viewed tentatively because, even though C# and the CLI are ECMA standards, Microsoft holds a patent on the technology. Microsoft holds a covenant not to sue open source developers based on their patents but has maintained the ability to pull the plug on the Mono development team if they felt the project was a threat. With the recent ruling, is Mono finally out of the woods. A firm precedent has been established that patents can't be applied to APIs. From what I understand, none of the Mono implementation is copied verbatim, only the API structure and functionality. It's a topic I have been personally interested in for years now as I have spent a lot of time developing cross-platform C# libraries in MonoDevelop. I acknowledge that this is a controversial topic, if you have opinions that's what commenting is for. Try to keep the answers factual and based on established sources.

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  • YouTube custom thumbnails feature availability

    - by skat
    I've been trying to figure out this on my own for weeks, but now I give up. 'Custom thumbnails' feature on YouTube is such a controversial one, it was changed so much... so much that even FAQ on YouTube doesn't fully describe it's features (as I see). I have a YouTube channel for one of my websites. This YouTube channel is main marketing force for my website - it brings all the boys to my yard (I mean, website). So I have to use all the hacky-tricky stuff to increase my visibility on youtube. And damn, those custom thumbnails are giving me hard times... As far as I understand, this is current state of 'custom thumbnail' feature: "If your account is in good standing, you may have the ability to upload custom thumbnails for your video uploads." (c) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/138008 My channel has good standing, has more than 50000 views. So why the hell my account is still not eligible for this feature? anyone have any idea?

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  • Why does Google's closure library not use real private members?

    - by Thor Thurn
    I've been a JavaScript developer for a while now, and I've always thought that the correct way to implement private members in JavaScript is to use the technique outlined by Doug Crockford here: http://javascript.crockford.com/private.html. I didn't think this was a particularly controversial piece of JavaScript wisdom, until I started using the Google Closure library. Imagine my surprise... the library makes no effort to use Crockford-style information hiding. All they do is use a special naming convention and note "private" members in the documentation. I'm in the habit of assuming that the guys at Google are usually on the leading edge of software quality, so what gives? Is there some downside to following Mr. Crockford's advice that's not obvious?

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  • Can you Borrow a PDF?

    - by WeNeedAnswers
    What are the legalities of letting someone borrow a book that you have purchased that so happens to be in PDF format with no DRM? I know that I can lend a printed book to someone and this not infringe copyright, but a pdf? I know that the thought police are going to be on my case about "no one here is a legal expert" or the "question can't be answered" or "controversial", But I would like to have the opportunity to at least surface the issue, and allow people to comment. I am not looking for point scoring on this, or even an answer, but as stackoverflow has a rather large technical savvy audience that would appreciate the question I think that it could be the next hurdle that will stop technical progress.

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  • number of methods in an interface.

    - by Jeow
    I know this might seem a controversial question but it really is not meant to be. is there an optimal number of methods in an interface. For example, I personally hate an interface with 20 methods. It is just difficult to implement. The contract seems to hard to maintain. Similarly if the number of methods is just 1. It makes me wonder if it is really a good abstraction. Any thoughts ?

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  • Move Window Buttons Back to the Right in Ubuntu 10.04

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    One of the more controversial changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 beta is the Mac OS-inspired change to have window buttons on the left side. We’ll show you how to move the buttons back to the right. Before While the change may or may not persist through to the April 29 release of Ubuntu 10.04, in the beta version the maximize, minimize, and close buttons appear in the top left of a window. How to move the window buttons The window button locations are dictated by a configuration file. We’ll use the graphical program gconf-editor to change this configuration file. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Application dialog box, enter “gconf-editor” in the text field, and click on Run. The Configuration Editor should pop up. The key that we want to edit is in apps/metacity/general. Click on the + button next to the “apps” folder, then beside “metacity” in the list of folders expanded for apps, and then click on the “general” folder. The button layout can be changed by changing the “button_layout” key. Double-click button_layout to edit it. Change the text in the Value text field to: menu:maximize,minimize,close Click OK and the change will occur immediately, changing the location of the window buttons in the Configuration Editor. Note that this ordering of the window buttons is slightly different than the typical order; in previous versions of Ubuntu and in Windows, the minimize button is to the left of the maximize button. You can change the button_layout string to reflect that ordering, but using the default Ubuntu 10.04 theme, it looks a bit strange. If you plan to change the theme, or even just the graphics used for the window buttons, then this ordering may be more natural to you. After After this change, all of your windows will have the maximize, minimize, and close buttons on the right. What do you think of Ubuntu 10.04’s visual change? Let us know in the comments! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Move a Window Without Clicking the Titlebar in UbuntuBring Misplaced Off-Screen Windows Back to Your Desktop (Keyboard Trick)Keep the Display From Turning Off on UbuntuPut Close/Maximize/Minimize Buttons on the Left in UbuntuAllow Remote Control To Your Desktop On Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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  • Understanding the JSF Lifecycle and ADF Optimized Lifecycle

    - by Steven Davelaar
    While coaching ADF development teams over the years, I have noticed that many developers lack a basic understanding of Java Server Faces, in particular the JSF lifecycle and how ADF optimizes this lifecycle in specific situations. As a result, ADF developers who are tasked to build a seemingly simple ADF page, can get extremely frustrated by the -in their eyes- unexpected or unlogical behavior of ADF.  They start to play with the immediate property and the partialTriggers property in a trial-and-error manner. Often, they play with these properties until their specific issue is solved, unaware of other more severe bugs that might be introduced by the values they choose for these properties. So, I decided to submit a presentation for the UKOUG entitled "What you need to know about JSF to be succesful with ADF".  The abstract was accepted, and I started putting together the presentation and demo application. I built up a demo application step-by-step, trying to cover the JSF-related  top issues and challenges I encountered over the years in a simple "Hello World" demo. This turned out to be both a very time-consuming and very interesting journey. I had never thought I would learn so much myself in preparing this presentation. I never thought I would end up with potentially controversial conclusions like "Never set immediate=true on an editable component".  I did not realize the sometimes immense implications of the ADF optimized lifecycle beforehand. I never thought that "Hello World" demo's could get so complex. But as I went on I was confident this was valuable material, even for experienced ADF developers with a good understanding of JSF. When I finished, I realized the original title and abstract was misleading, as was the target audience. Yes, it was covering the JSF lifecycle, but no other aspects of JSF you need to know for ADF development. Yes, it was covering some JSF basics as mentioned in the abstract, but all in all it had become a pretty advanced presentation. At the same time, the issues discussed are very common, novice ADF developers might easily run into them while building their first pages. I ran out of time, so I decided to just present what I had, apologizing at the beginning for the misleading title, showing a second slide with a better title "18 invaluable lessons about ADF-JSF interaction". I think the presentation was well received overall, although people who don't like it or don't understand it, usually don't come and tell you afterwards.... I am still struggling with the title, for this blog post I used yet another title, anyway, you can download the presentation-that-still-lacks-a-good-title here. The finished JDev 11.1.1.6 demo app can be downloaded here.  The 18 lessons mentioned in the presentation are summarized here. As mentioned on the last slide, print out the lessons, and learn them by heart, I am pretty sure it will save you lots of time and frustration!

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  • Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?

    - by Artyom
    I'm going to ask what is probably quite a controversial question: "Should one of the most popular encodings, UTF-16, be considered harmful?" Why do I ask this question? How many programmers are aware of the fact that UTF-16 is actually a variable length encoding? By this I mean that there are code points that, represented as surrogate pairs, take more than one element. I know; lots of applications, frameworks and APIs use UTF-16, such as Java's String, C#'s String, Win32 APIs, Qt GUI libraries, the ICU Unicode library, etc. However, with all of that, there are lots of basic bugs in the processing of characters out of BMP (characters that should be encoded using two UTF-16 elements). For example, try to edit one of these characters: 𝄞 (U+1D11E) MUSICAL SYMBOL G CLEF 𝕥 (U+1D565) MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK SMALL T 𝟶 (U+1D7F6) MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE DIGIT ZERO 𠂊 (U+2008A) Han Character You may miss some, depending on what fonts you have installed. These characters are all outside of the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). If you cannot see these characters, you can also try looking at them in the Unicode Character reference. For example, try to create file names in Windows that include these characters; try to delete these characters with a "backspace" to see how they behave in different applications that use UTF-16. I did some tests and the results are quite bad: Opera has problem with editing them (delete required 2 presses on backspace) Notepad can't deal with them correctly (delete required 2 presses on backspace) File names editing in Window dialogs in broken (delete required 2 presses on backspace) All QT3 applications can't deal with them - show two empty squares instead of one symbol. Python encodes such characters incorrectly when used directly u'X'!=unicode('X','utf-16') on some platforms when X in character outside of BMP. Python 2.5 unicodedata fails to get properties on such characters when python compiled with UTF-16 Unicode strings. StackOverflow seems to remove these characters from the text if edited directly in as Unicode characters (these characters are shown using HTML Unicode escapes). WinForms TextBox may generate invalid string when limited with MaxLength. It seems that such bugs are extremely easy to find in many applications that use UTF-16. So... Do you think that UTF-16 should be considered harmful?

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  • SQL: empty string vs NULL value

    - by Jacek Prucia
    I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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  • Can I get all active directory passwords in clear text using reversible encryption?

    - by christian123
    EDIT: Can anybody actually answer the question? Thanks, I don't need no audit trail, I WILL know all the passwords and users can't change them and I will continue to do so. This is not for hacking! We recently migrated away from a old and rusty Linux/Samba domain to an active directory. We had a custom little interface to manage accounts there. It always stored the passwords of all users and all service accounts in cleartext in a secure location (Of course, many of you will certainly not think of this a being secure, but without real exploits nobody could read that) and disabled password changing on the samba domain controller. In addition, no user can ever select his own passwords, we create them using pwgen. We don't change them every 40 days or so, but only every 2 years to reward employees for really learning them and NOT writing them down. We need the passwords to e.g. go into user accounts and modify settings that are too complicated for group policies or to help users. These might certainly be controversial policies, but I want to continue them on AD. Now I save new accounts and their PWGEN-generated (pwgen creates nice sounding random words with nice amounts of vowels, consonants and numbers) manually into the old text-file that the old scripts used to maintain automatically. How can I get this functionality back in AD? I see that there is "reversible encryption" in AD accounts, probably for challenge response authentication systems that need the cleartext password stored on the server. Is there a script that displays all these passwords? That would be great. (Again: I trust my DC not to be compromised.) Or can I have a plugin into AD users&computers that gets a notification of every new password and stores it into a file? On clients that is possible with GINA-dlls, they can get notified about passwords and get the cleartext.

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  • More SQL Smells

    - by Nick Harrison
    Let's continue exploring some of the SQL Smells from Phil's list. He has been putting together. Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) This is a great example poking holes in the whole theory of "If it works it's not broken" Queries will this probably will generally work and give the correct response. In fact, without careful analysis, you probably may be completely oblivious that there is even a problem. This subtle little problem will needlessly complicate queries and slow them down regardless of the indexes applied. Consider this example: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Page](     [PageId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [Title] [varchar](75) NOT NULL,     [Sequence] [int] NOT NULL,     [ThemeId] [int] NOT NULL,     [CustomCss] [text] NOT NULL,     [CustomScript] [text] NOT NULL,     [PageGroupId] [int] NOT NULL;  CREATE PROCEDURE PageSelectBySequence ( @sequenceMin smallint , @sequenceMax smallint ) AS BEGIN SELECT [PageId] , [Title] , [Sequence] , [ThemeId] , [CustomCss] , [CustomScript] , [PageGroupId] FROM [CMS].[dbo].[Page] WHERE Sequence BETWEEN @sequenceMin AND @SequenceMax END  Note that the Sequence column is defined as int while the sequence parameter is defined as a small int. The problem is that the database may have to do a lot of type conversions to evaluate the query. In some cases, this may even negate the indexes that you have in place. Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) There are two main problems here. The first is a little subjective, since this is a non-standard way of expressing the query, it is harder to understand. The other problem is much more objective and potentially problematic. You are taking much of the control away from the optimizer. Written properly, such a query may well out perform a corresponding query written with traditional joins. More likely than not, performance will degrade. Whenever you assume that you know better than the optimizer, you will most likely be wrong. This is the fundmental problem with any hint. Consider a query like this:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , ( SELECT EffectName FROM dbo.Effect WHERE EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId ) AS EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId  This can and should be written as:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId INNER JOIN dbo.Effect ON dbo.Effects.EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId  The correlated query may just as easily show up in the where clause. It's not a good idea in the select clause or the where clause. Few or No comments. This one is a bit more complicated and controversial. All comments are not created equal. Some comments are helpful and need to be included. Other comments are not necessary and may indicate a problem. I tend to follow the rule of thumb that comments that explain why are good. Comments that explain how are bad. Many people may be shocked to hear the idea of a bad comment, but hear me out. If a comment is needed to explain what is going on or how it works, the logic is too complex and needs to be simplified. Comments that explain why are good. Comments may explain why the sql is needed are good. Comments that explain where the sql is used are good. Comments that explain how tables are related should not be needed if the sql is well written. If they are needed, you need to consider reworking the sql or simplify your data model. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Calling a function in the where clause will often negate the indexing strategy. The function will be called for every record considered. This will often a force a full table scan on the tables affected. Calling a function will not guarantee that there is a full table scan, but there is a good chance that it will. If you find that you often need to write queries using a particular function, you may need to add a column to the table that has the function already applied.

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  • Tuning Red Gate: #3 of Lots

    - by Grant Fritchey
    I'm drilling down into the metrics about SQL Server itself available to me in the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor to see what's up with our two problematic servers. In the previous post I'd noticed that rg-sql01 had quite a few CPU spikes. So one of the first things I want to check there is how much CPU is getting used by SQL Server itself. It's possible we're looking at some other process using up all the CPU Nope, It's SQL Server. I compared this to the rg-sql02 server: You can see that there is a more, consistently low set of CPU counters there. I clearly need to look at rg-sql01 and capture more specific data around the queries running on it to identify which ones are causing these CPU spikes. I always like to look at the Batch Requests/sec on a server, not because it's an indication of a problem, but because it gives you some idea of the load. Just how much is this server getting hit? Here are rg-sql01 and rg-sql02: Of the two, clearly rg-sql01 has a lot of activity. Remember though, that's all this is a measure of, activity. It doesn't suggest anything other than what it says, the number of requests coming in. But it's the kind of thing you want to know in order to understand how the system is used. Are you seeing a correlation between the number of requests and the CPU usage, or a reverse correlation, the number of requests drops as the CPU spikes? See, it's useful. Some of the details you can look at are Compilations/sec, Compilations/Batch and Recompilations/sec. These give you some idea of how the cache is getting used within the system. None of these showed anything interesting on either server. One metric that I like (even though I know it can be controversial) is the Page Life Expectancy. On the average server I expect see a series of mountains as the PLE climbs then drops due to a data load or something along those lines. That's not the case here: Those spikes back in January suggest that the servers weren't really being used much. The PLE on the rg-sql01 seems to be somewhat consistent growing to 3 hours or so then dropping, but the rg-sql02 PLE looks like it might be all over the map. Instead of continuing to look at this high level gathering data view, I'm going to drill down on rg-sql02 and see what it's done for the last week: And now we begin to see where we might have an issue. Memory on this system is getting flushed every 1/2 hour or so. I'm going to check another metric, scans: Whoa! I'm going back to the system real quick to look at some disk information again for rg-sql02. Here is the average disk queue length on the server: and the transfers Right, I think I have a guess as to what's up here. We're seeing memory get flushed constantly and we're seeing lots of scans. The disks are queuing, especially that F drive, and there are lots of requests that correspond to the scans and the memory flushes. In short, we've got queries that are scanning the data, a lot, so we either have bad queries or bad indexes. I'm going back to the server overview for rg-sql02 and check the Top 10 expensive queries. I'm modifying it to show me the last 3 days and the totals, so I'm not looking at some maintenance routine that ran 10 minutes ago and is skewing the results: OK. I need to look into these queries that are getting executed this much. They're generating a lot of reads, but which queries are generating the most reads: Ow, all still going against the same database. This is where I'm going to temporarily leave SQL Monitor. What I want to do is connect up to the server, validate that the Warehouse database is using the F:\ drive (which I'll put money down it is) and then start seeing what's up with these queries. Part 1 of the Series Part 2 of the Series

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  • Measuring Code Quality

    - by DotNetBlues
    Several months back, I was tasked with measuring the quality of code in my organization. Foolishly, I said, "No problem." I figured that Visual Studio has a built-in code metrics tool (Analyze -> Calculate Code Metrics) and that would be a fine place to start with. I was right, but also very wrong. The Visual Studio calculates five primary metrics: Maintainability Index, Cyclomatic Complexity, Depth of Inheritance, Class Coupling, and Lines of Code. The first two are figured at the method level, the second at (primarily) the class level, and the last is a simple count. The first question any reasonable person should ask is "Which one do I look at first?" The first question any manager is going to ask is, "What one number tells me about the whole application?" My answer to both, in a way, was "Maintainability Index." Why? Because each of the other numbers represent one element of quality while MI is a composite number that includes Cyclomatic Complexity. I'd be lying if I said no consideration was given to the fact that it was abstract enough that it's harder for some surly developer (I've been known to resemble that remark) to start arguing why a high coupling or inheritance is no big deal or how complex requirements are to blame for complex code. I should also note that I don't think there is one magic bullet metric that will tell you objectively how good a code base is. There are a ton of different metrics out there, and each one was created for a specific purpose in mind and has a pet theory behind it. When you've got a group of developers who aren't accustomed to measuring code quality, picking a 0-100 scale, non-controversial metric that can be easily generated by tools you already own really isn't a bad place to start. That sort of answers the question a developer would ask, but what about the management question; how do you dashboard this stuff when Visual Studio doesn't roll up the numbers to the solution level? Since VS does roll up the MI to the project level, I thought I could just figure out what sort of weighting Microsoft used to roll method scores up to the class level and then to the namespace and project levels. I was a bit surprised by the answer: there is no weighting. That means that a class with one 1300 line method (which will score a 0 MI) and one empty constructor (which will score a 100 MI) will have an overall MI of a respectable 50. Throw in a couple of DTOs that are nothing more than getters and setters (which tend to score 95 or better) and the project ends up looking really, really healthy. The next poor bastard who has to work on the application is probably not going to be singing the praises of its maintainability, though. For the record, that 1300 line method isn't a hypothetical, either. So, what does one do with that? Well, I decided to weight the average by the Lines of Code per method. For our above example, the formula for the class's MI becomes ((1300 * 0) + (1 * 100))/1301 = .077, rounded to 0. Sounds about right. Continue the pattern for namespace, project, solution, and even multi-solution application MI scores. This can be done relatively easily by using the "export to Excel" button and running a quick formula against the data. On the short list of follow-up questions would be, "How do I improve my application's score?" That's an answer for another time, though.

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  • What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

    - by Christina McKeon
    American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

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  • Learn Many Languages

    - by Jeff Foster
    My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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  • Incentivizing Work with Development Teams

    - by MarkPearl
    Recently I saw someone on twitter asking about incentives and if anyone had past experience with incentivizing work. I promised to respond with some of the experiences I have had in the past so here goes... **Disclaimer** - these are my experiences with incentives, generally in software development - in some other industries this may not be applicable – this is also my thinking at this point in time, with more experience my opinion may change. Incentivize at the level that you want people to group at If you are wanting to promote a team mentality, incentivize teams. If you want to promote an individual mentality, incentivize individuals. There is nothing worse than mixing this up. Some organizations put a lot of effort in establishing teams and team mentalities but reward individuals. This has a counter effect on the resources they have put towards establishing a team mentality. In the software projects that I work with we want promote cross functional teams that collaborate. Personally, if I was on a team and knew that there was an opportunity to work on a critical component of the system, and that by doing so I would get a bigger bonus, then I would be hesitant to include other people in solving that problem. Thus, I would hinder the teams efforts in being cross functional and reduce collaboration levels. Does that mean everyone in the team should get an even share of an incentive? In most situations I would say yes - even though this may feel counter-intuitive. I have heard arguments put forward that if “person x contributed more than person Y then they should be rewarded more” – This may sound controversial but I would rather treat people how would you like them to perform, not where they currently are at. To add to this approach, if someone is free loading, you bet your bottom dollar that the team is going to make this a lot more transparent if they feel that individual is going to be rewarded at the same level that everyone else is. Bad incentives promote destructive work If you are going to incentivize people, pick you incentives very carefully. I had an experience once with a sales person who was told they would get a bonus provided that they met an ordering target with a particular supplier. What did this person do? They sold everything at cost for the next month or so. They reached the goal, but the company didn't gain anything from it. It was a bad incentive. Expect the same with development teams, if you incentivize zero bug levels, you will get zero code committed to the solution. If you incentivize lines of code, you will get many many lines of bad code. Is there such a thing as a good incentives? Monetary wise, I am not sure there is. I would much rather encourage organizations to pay their people what they are worth upfront. I would also advise against paying money to teams as an incentive or even a bonus or reward for reaching a milestone. Rather have a breakaway for the team that promotes team building as a reward if they reach a milestone than pay them more money. I would also advise against making the incentive the reason for them to reach the milestone. If this becomes the norm it promotes people to begin to only do their job if there is an incentive at the end of the line. This is not a behaviour one wants to encourage. If the team or individual is in the right mind-set, they should not work any harder than they are right now with normal pay.

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