December 2005 - Posts
This is great, another rant from Joel, this time on the
state of CS Degrees.
I didn't grow up in the punch card days, though I heard about it from my oldest step-brother, who did. Instead, I grew up with early PCs (TRS-80s) in school where time was limited, you could see the compiler work through the lines of code, and you needed to be prepared before you typed. I went to Syracuse in 1985 as a CS major and my first class was a lecture hall of 120 or so.
And in LISP.
That was a weedout course because while many of us had computers or had worked on them in high school, we'd done procedural, BASIC, PASCAL, maybe some C programming. But LISP really changes the way you look at problems and while I enjoyed it, I also "tutored" a few people that didn't. I even did some coursework for people with the understanding that they'd drop out the next semester. Didn't see the sense of ruining their GPA because they'd gotten in over their heads.
The second semester wasn't much better. We moved in APL (yikes, right to left processing) and Fortran. So on top of learning concepts and new ideas, we also had to grasp strange languages. I think half the class in CS bailed during that year. Add to that the interactive terminals running OS/360 or some other archaic setup and a centralized print room in the CS building where you'd hike through a foot or so of snow to get your printout. No personal printers in that place.
I switched majors my second year because I became somewhat disenchanted with computers as well as saw business as the better place to be. I went on to get an Economics degree, only to move back to computer engineering in grad school 6 years later. Now we had PCs, Solaris boxes at school and I had a 486 at work and home. I upgraded SunOS ro Solaris, learned C, software engineering, and many other more modern practices.
But we still have to learn pointers and recursion. We had to understand the basics of computer science.
I see Joel's point. I've worked with many people that have graduated in the last 10 years that I don't think have a fundamental grasp of programming and the development of algorithms. They just don't know how to think.
Anything that is really worth having and valuable takes an effort to achieve. I think the future architects, software designers, and engineers should struggle and learn the basics as a foundation. While I don't think I'd do great on Joel's test, I do understand the concepts. To me, a language is just that, a language. There's nothing different about programming in C, VB, Java, C++, or anything else. It's mostly syntax and an OOP-Procedural style.
Even T-SQL uses many of the same programming skills I learned with Pascal. It's slightly different in that I deal with sets, but I think the mental flexibility I learned early in programming helped me to deal with that.
I've had a new web server for a couple months and I've been slowly testing things as I can in preparation for a move of the main SQLServerCentral.com site. What I thought would be a simple, click on everything test, has turned into quite a challenge, and more tedious than I imagined.
The big issue has been that we have purchased a few things, like the forum software, that requires a specific domain to be authorized. In this case, the code we have is keyed to www.ssc.com, which isn't my test site for obvious reasons. I could add a localhost entry on my machine, but I've gotten into trouble before forgetting to switch things back, so I only do this when I really have some dedicated testing time for this and nothing else.
The other issue is that for some reason early on we entered the absolute URL in many places. I think this was to make it easier for the newsletter generation, but we could have handled that better. What this now means is that in many places the whole "http://www." is encoded in the database, rendering my test site broken. Often I click on a link and it takes me back to the production site and I need to search and replace the hostname with my test site.
Note that I'm not giving it out because it's not ready for prime time.
But it's close. With some testing time tomorrow, I'm hoping to make a switch this weekend for a few hours and test things. So if things aren't working this weekend, have some patience. I'll likely switch back before Monday and make the real cut in a week or so.
At least for me :)
My wife and I put an offer in on a house this past Monday and spent all week kind of on pins and needles. It was a foreclosure, so someone lost it and the bank owns it. There were two offers in on Monday, so we revised ours Mon night and just heard last night that we got it!
So it's an early Christmas for us and we're very excited to be moving in January.
It's funny that our decision to look at a house is so similar to job hunting. We bought this last house (the one we currently reside in) almost 3 years ago and were really thinking this would be the last move for 15 years until the kids got out of school. At the time, it was a relatively short commute for me, a nice house with lots of land (2 acres) and we thought it was great. We built a barn last year and it seemed that things were going well.
But things change and we're miles from where we were last summer, not to mention 3 years ago. The kids have all changed schools for various reasons and my wife is more interested in her horses than ever, to the point where she's building a business and making money.
So we thought about moving and actually getting a smaller mortgage. I was skeptical when we started, but we found a fantastic house, with more land and we should sell our house for more than we'll pay for the new one. And it's a great house, getting me excited to move.
My job hunting has turned out to be similar. Make the best decision at the time when you are looking or have an offer without spending too much time thinking down the road. I've seen life take some amazing turns and planning to far in advance has never worked that well for me. In jobs or houses.
So if I don't post a lot in the next month, chalk it up to packing and taping and cleaning this house!
I get a lot of email at SQLServerCentral.com on a variety of topics. Complaints about my writing, comments on the site, problems, etc. But there are a couple things I don't understand. The first is the amount of stuff submitted through our
problem report page.
It plainly says in large red letters that if you have a SQL question, click a link and post a question in the forums. But I still get lots of SQL questions sent through and I have a standard signature setup that asks people to post in the forums that I send back.
The second thing that amazes me (apart from the all caps) is this type of question:
THIS IS REQUEST TO YOU THAT I WANT TO MAKE A PROJECT FOR SQL SERVER 2000 SO
PLESE HELP ME HOW TO MAKE IT AND SEND ME TOTAL INFORMATION ABOUT SQL SERVER 2000
. YOU CAN SEND ME THE DEVELOPER OF SQL SERVER 2000 AND SO MORE INFORMATION .
THIS PROJECT IS VERY URGENT SO PLS SEND ME ALL THE INFORMATION
ASAP.
AWATING FOR YOUR QUICK REPLY.
How can this even be a question you ask someone? Either this is an assignment from academia or some project from work, but in either case, if you need this much help urgently, perhaps you should seek employment or study elsewhere.
I wrote a little in the editorial, but I wanted to drop some other observations here.
First, apologies for not blogging more, but I've been buried with kid stuff. Had my son move to a new school and it added much confusion and uproar in the home schedule.
At the launch, it was a beautiful 20F Denver day with snow falling as I drove downtown. At lunch I sat in the window and enjoyed the view from inside a nice warm building behind 20 ft windows looking out over the mountains, which I couldn't see, but it was gorgeous. If only it were Christmas...
There were at least 600-700 people, maybe more in the keynote, which was mostly a very contrived demo. They did have one local guy talk about his multi-terabyte warehouse, but his delivery was horrible and I ended up leaving. It did seem to me that most of the time was spent on VS 2005 and BizTalk 2006, but I did miss the first half hour.
After that I wandered around the expo, which was very small compared to PASS and about the size of a single major booth at Tech Ed. Still it was good to see some local companies, especially consulting companies since it's always good to make some contacts at things like this. Since I saw Mike White from Boulder and PASS and then Bill Wunder, I missed the first breakout. I did get to the second one on why to upgrade to 64bit and I have to say that I don't see any reason unless you are really pushing the limits of your 32 bit server. the presentation was lots of facts like "we've converted customers and they're 10x faster, but no detail or data to back it up. I swear these presentations are getting less and less worth listening to because they are so full of marketing and afraid to admit anything. Without the prizes I'm not sure most people would have stayed.
Afterways I talked with the speaker and he was more knowledgeable than I expected. I asked him specifically about performance in testing with similar RAM and he said it's still faster with the 64 bit processors. He attributes the better performance, especially in IO bound systems to the wider bus throwing data around quicker. I need to get back with Unisys and I think design some tests and go try this. If anyone has ideas, send me an email.
I asked about hyperthreading, actually a few people and they said it depends. So no good guidelines for determining this. I think I need a rant on the site to get someone to listen and actually publish something. Another HP guy chimed in and they said that the new CPUs have dual cores, so they are not hyperthreaded, but 2 cores together mainly for licensing purposes. Since SQL Server is by CPU, you can consolidate and save some money with 64 bit.
They also gave me a reason that made sense as to why the IA64 architecture is better than the AMD, but they expected AMD in the next version to implement a similar scheme. Sorry I don't remember, but I'm just not smart enough to get that.
I had to leave to grab kids, so I stopped back by the experts booth and fielded a few questions from people walking by with Bill Wunder. We had some advice for a few people though a guy with an AS question had us stumped. Fortunately Mike was nearby to bail us out.
One guy had an ? about a reporting server and using replication v mirroring. We told him that mirroring isn't a readable db, but mirroring + snapshot makes more sense than replication from an admin point of view. Another good debate and paper to get out there.
For a free event, it was a great time. Not like the conferences, but Microsoft put on a great time.
Maybe not certified, but I took the 70-441 test today and I thought it was relatively easy. The format was also quite a change and I did like that.
Look for some writeups coming soon on the site, but I wouldn't cram and worry too much about upgrading the development side of your MCDBA.