You know your week starts great, when you receive a call, that the whole shop database of a company is not working anymore.
Turns out MS Fucking SQL decided to drop all tables, just because the harddisk was full.

A SERIOUS FUCK YOU TO MICROSCHROTT!

It's not a lot of fun, when 15 people have to wait for you about 1 hour, until it is restored.

Why does this have to happen on a monday?

Experience that made me feel like a dev badass?

Users requested the ability to 'send' information from one application to another. Couple of our senior devs started out saying it would be impossible (there is no way to pass objects across a machine's memory boundary), then entertained the idea of utilizing the various messaging frameworks such as Microsoft's ServiceBus and RabbitMQ, but came up with a plan to use 2 WebAPI services (one messenger, one receiver) along with a homegrown messaging API (the clients would 'poll' the services looking for message) because ServiceBus, RabbitMQ, etc might not be able to scale to our needs. Their initial estimates were about 6 months development for the two services, hardware requirement for two servers, MSSQL server licenses, and padded an additional 6 months for client modifications. Very...very proud of their detailed planning.

I thought ...hmmm...I've done memory maps and created simple TCP/IP hosts that could send messages back and forth between other apps (non-UI), WPF couldn't be that much different.

In an afternoon, I came up with this (see attached), and showed the boss. Guess which solution we're going with.

The two devs are still kinda pissed at me. One still likes say as I walk in the room "our hero returns"....frack him.

I remember that time my class (first year of software development) wrote a huge project for a real company as practice for irl stuff.

I was the only Linux user and it would be deployed on a Linux server.

Spent 10 weeks of development and then the moment of deployment on a Linux server began!

.
.
.
.
.

Nothing was case sensitive, everything was programmed for a windows architecture (backward slashes etc) and mssql was used while we would host it on a MySQL server.

The tree core guys spent three days or so to make the entire fucker compatible 😂

It was enjoyable to see them (literally) sweat 😊 (it had been known from the very beginning)

"I found this tool that we should use because I'm a manager and its simple enough that my tiny little manager brain could set it up!"

Oh wow good for you, Mr. Manager! And what, praytell, does the tool require?

"All proprietary and cost-ineffecient products: MSSQL Server and Windows IIS! What do you mean we have to get the data out in order for it to be scalable? Look at it! I set up a website by clicking on an EXE i downloaded from github!"

Amazing, Mr. Manager. So you violated our security practices AND want to pocket even MORE of our budget?

Kindly fuck right off and start suggesting things instead of making people embarrass you into stoping your fight for your tool (has happened on more than one occassion).

I am a mechanical engineer first and my companies go to sysadmin second. So software developing isnt really my main field of expertise buuttt:

WHY IS SLOOPY SOFTWARE WRITING A VIABLE EXCUSE?

Story:
Yesterday i started to migrate some stuff from our old Win 2008 Server to the new 2016. Turns out there are some MS SQL Express Servers running. Quick check for what they are turns out that they are activly used. So far so good. For other reasons we have a new MSSQL 2017 Core Licence. So i thought, hey it would be nice to just move those 2012, 2008 and 2014 Express Servers to a real one that can use the entire machines capabilities.
After some try & error with exporting one of the softwares (where i had to elevate one the user rights to sysadmin for reasons) the entire system stopped working. I didnt deleted anything or changed anything! Well, i elevated user rights. After 2 hours of support call it turns out that the software stopped working cause i gave the database user sysadmin rights. I dont know enough about MSSQL to judge wether that is logical or not, but it sounds super illogical and i suspect sloopy software writing on the manufacturers part. One way or another, the excuse from the telephone support was "yeah, our software is a very fragile child"
Okay.
After i told all that my coworkers two of them were also "yeah, that is just how the [company] software is, you have to be careful with it"

Apparently it broke in the past for other minor stuff.
As an engineer i cannot build bridges that collapse when you use the left and the right lane at the same time. For an architect it isnt okay to build an house where the front door explodes when you open a window. It is not okay for a power tool to go out in a fireball when you accidently drill plastic with it. But for some weird reasons its socially acceptable for programs to be sloopy, buggy and only working under specific conditions. Since when is it okay for a car only to work when you know specific steps to make it run? Like, throwing your spare key in the gas tank, the kick the left wheel exactly three times and finally tapping the steering wheel 5 times left, 4 times right. What? That would be ridiculous? But that is exactly how that software works. You have to follow a specific step guide to make it work, EVERY TIME.

I. JUST. DONT. GET. IT

I am now a certified "Microsoft Technology Associate for Database Fundamentals". 😁🎉 Had to do this certification for my "Berufsausbildung".

The company I work for uses Coldfusion which is a dead technology in my opinion. I was tasked with using a data grid for our data from our mssql databases. This data grid I was trying out uses ajax to make a call to the server and expects the data transfered back in Json format. well coldfusion sucks balls because it's serializeJson function returns a outdated JSON structure and I can't use it. So obviously this datagrid throws errors and when I try looking up coldfusion solutions online or scope out stack overflow, the posts are dated like 6 years back because no one fucking uses CF anymore. My boss loves to jerk to it, it seems because he refuses to change languages cause its all they have ever used. -_- this is 2016 bitch lol

So today i have to install the gigantic shit called cPanel on a vm that run on a macmini..

Our server are on cpanel, I'm installing it for tests purpose..

I already know that i'll swear more than i ever did before when i'll have to make pdo odbc working on easyapache4 for our db hosted on mssql server... RIP me

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

An issue occurs, resolve it with a "Could not reproduce", client asks for a report on what happened, what parts did it affect and how will we prevent it in the future...

To make things worse it looks like it might have been an issue with MSSQL server throwing weird data out and not a problem with my code...

There were many issues that came about during my entire employment, but I woke up today with some, honestly, quite bizarre questions from my manager that made me open an account here. This is just the latest in many frustrations I have had.

For context, my manager is more of a "tech lead" who maintains a few projects, the number can probably be counted in one hand. So he does have the knowledge to make changes when needed.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to develop a utility tool to retrieve users from Active Directory and insert them into a MSSQL Database, pretty straight forward and there were no other requirements.

I developed it, tested it, pushed it to our repository, then deployed the latest build to the server that had Active Directory, told my manager that I had done so and left it at that.

A few weeks later,
Manager: "Can you update the tool to now support inserting to both MSSQL and MySQL?"

Me: "Sure." (Would've been nice to know that beforehand since I'm already working on something else but I understand that maybe it wasn't in the original scope)

I do that and redeploy it, even wrote documentation explaining what it did and how it worked. And as per his request, a technical documentation as well that explains more in depth how it works. The documents were uploaded as well.

A few days after I have done so,
Manager: "Can you send me the built program with the documentation directly?"

I said nothing and just did as he asked even though I know he could've just retrieved it himself considering I've uploaded and deployed them all.

This morning,
Manager: "When I click on this thing, I receive this error."

Me: "Where are you running the tool?"

Manager: "My own laptop."

Me: "Does your laptop have Active Directory?"

Manager: "Nope, but I am connected to the server with Active Directory."

Me: "Well the tool can only retrieve Active Directory information on a PC with it."

Manager: "Oh you mean it has to run on the PC with Active Directory?"

Me: "Yeah?"

Manager: "Alright. Also, what is the valid value for this configuration? You mentioned it is the Database connection string."

After that I just gave up and stopped responding. Not long after, he sent me a screenshot of the configuration file where he finally figured out what to put in.

A few minutes later,
Manager: "Got this error." And sends a screenshot that tells you what the error is.

Me: "The connection string you set is pointing to the wrong database schema."

Manager: "Oh whoops. Now it works. Anyway, what are these attribute values you retrieve from Active Directory? Also, what is the method you used to connect/query/retrieve the users? I need to document it down for the higher ups."

Me: "The values are the username, name and email? And as mentioned in the technical documentation, it's retrieving using this method."

The 2+ years I have been working with this company has been some of the most frustrating in my entire life. But thankfully, this is the final month I will be working with them.

my client has the most ridiculous tech stack for displaying an admin ui website I've ever seen.

* They have a mssql as db (on a separate machine)
* node js backend followed by a nuxt js backend (why???)
* then a nginx and on yet another server an apache

!rant

Yesterday I have to do something I never thought I'd need to. A little background: I dislike PHP and MS SQL Server; however, they pay the bills.

So yesterday in order to get work done I had to install in my Linux machine a Windows 7 VirtualBox with SQL Server on it and had to compile the php mssql modules by hand and... everything worked flawlessly. It was pretty awesome.

Kudos to VirtualBox and the team behind the open source php mssql modules.

So they asked if we want a wallboard or not and we answered with a NO. As you already guessed we still got a wall mounted LG TV with a small linux box.
So I started to tinker with the wallboard and created a horrible python -> HTML5/JS stuff which crawls the data worth to show and creates static pages with html5 canvas for graphs.
Later I found atlasboard which is a discontinuated dashboard from Atlassian so started to learn nodejs and rebuilt and added new widgets to show our smoketests, our mssql server metrics from zabbix, our sprint from Jira and some other servers' status.
Then I created the essential metrics again but in Vice C64 emu, I collected and exported the data in python created a PETSCII compatible .prg file and the **** Dasboard 64 **** loaded and created graphs in the emu every minutes.
That was awesome! BASIC V2 is slow as hell but still awesome.

Disclaimer: Technically it's not "our" stack, but we have to use it so....

A webapp we built runs inside the company's network we built it for. Their IT are windows lovers, so everything has to run on Windows servers, even the tablets which are used to access said web app need to have windows.
Their company network isn't accessable from the outside world, so we have access via VPN to get into their network. But this isn't enough to access that shitty windows server our software runs on. After that VPN, you have to connect to a different VPN to which you can only connect to while you're inside the company's network. Then you have access to two servers, one the application is running on and one, well to see if you're changes were deployed correctly because the production server doesn't have a browser on it other than shitty internet explorer 8.

The only way to connect to the server is using RDP. Not even samba or so. To deploy the changes we made to our app, you need to copy paste the files from your local machine to the server. And don't get me started on running mssql migration with the shitty mssql console 😤😤

Why would anyone who isn't a complete idiot use Windows for servers or mssql in the first place????

I took over an application that consisted of 4 MSSQL (2005 at the time) databases, hundreds of tables, thousands of stored procedures, maybe a 1/4 of them actual still being used, external links to more than 20 other databases (MSSQL, Oracle and DB2) which all ran from a single "master" stored proc that was kicked off nightly by scheduled job.

The existing documentation consisted of a single word document, about three pages long, describing how to set up the application... on the Sql Server 6 server it had been originally created on two generations ago.

i am currently tasked with testing various small company ERP softwares.
for the current one i have a full 30 days evaluation copy based on MSSQL Server, i had some problems to integrate the local MS Jet Databse into the server so i call support, all is well and good..except it doesnt work. After a while it turns out, my 15 character password was too long for their software to handle. Furthermore, everytime i try to login i have to enter the password twice, after asking the support why that is they say "so you have additional validation if you entered the correct password"

i tried to explain three times that i know the password, i dont create a password, there is no need for validation, the server (hopefully) will report wether my password was right or wrong. Support guy just says "i think differently, this is a good function"

in a few weeks i will visit them personally for a meeting, i dont know yet if i can stop myself stranggling this buffon

Im completely stuck in this, might just have been gotten mad and it's real simple.. butncould anyone help me write an sql select statement that would solve this issue ?
Problem statement and examples are on the picture :)

Thanks in advance!
(Data not the actual data needed but resembles structure im trying to do)

A question guys, I'm looking for a DB client. We are using SQL Management Server Studio, but its way way overkill for a frontend guy like me.

Min Requirements:
- Needs to be simple
- Must support MSSQL
- Plugin support and/or dark mode
- Free and/or not too buggy evaluation (like Sublime or Winrar)
- GUI should be reasonably modern
- Should also be native. Our database is a denormalized mess.

Not a rant, but seeking advice...

Should I abandon 2 years' worth of work on migrating a personal project from SQL (M$) to a Graph database, and just stick to SQL? And only consider migrating when/if I need graph capabilities?

The project is a small social media platform. Has around ~50 monthly active users.

Why I started the migration in the first place:
• When researching databases, I read that for social media, graph is more suitable. It was, at least in terms of query structure. It was more natural, there were no "joins", and queries were much simpler than their SQL counterparts.

• In case the project got big, I didn't want to have to panic-deal with database issues that come with growth. I had some indexing issues with MSSQL, and it got me worried that at 50MAU I'm having these issues, what would happen if I get more?

• It's a personal project, and the Gremlin language and graph databases looked cool and I was motivated to learn something new.

----

Why I'm considering aborting the migration:
• It's taking too damn long. I'm unable to work on other features because this migration is taking up all my free time. Sunk cost fallacy is hitting me hard with this one.

• In local testing within docker, it's extremely slow. I tried various graph engines (janusgraph, official tinkerpop, orientdb), and the fastest one takes 4-6minutes to complete my server tests. SQL finishes the same tests in under 2 minutes, same docker environment. I also tried running my tests on a remote server (AWS neptune) and it was just as slow. Maybe my queries are bad, but can I afford to spend even more time fine tuning all queries?

• I now realise that "graph = no scalability issues" was naïve of me, and 100% wishful thinking. Scalability issues don't care what database I use, but about how well tuned and configured the whole system is.

• I really want to move on. My tech stack is falling behind and becoming outdated. I'm unable to maintain dependencies.

• I'm worried about losing those 50 MAU because they're essential to gaining traction once I release the platform. I keep telling them about the migration but at some point (2 years later) they're going to get bored I feel.

I guess partially it's a rant because I feel like I shouldn't stop now having spent 2 years on this, but at the same time I feel like I'm heading towards a dead end.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading:)

Interviewed for a job. Said that the colleague in charge of data engineering picked MSSQL Server for data warehousing, and that I had to write a plugin for that.

Interviewer - experienced in all things data - chuckled as soon as I said Microsoft.