Are the posted questions getting worse?
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I still don't want to be in the business of censoring what goes out and what doesn't. As mentioned in the debate, there is still some uncertainty about what might happen, and it is a technique that can work in situations.
I can't be in, and don't want to be in, the business of trying to decide what advice should and should not be given. I want to give people a voice to reach others and try to educate them. To do that, we have to allow a variety of authors and ideas to get out there. That includes controversial and debatable topics.
Can I stop Joe developer from mis-using advice? No. But that's a different problem. I don't want to put out information that will damage a system, but I also don't want to to heavily judge where and when that will occur.
I also can't, and I'm not sure who can, test every execution plan and every piece of code for performance issues. The technique, while one I wouldn't use, did not seem to be egregiously bad, and even if I had run an execution plan, would I have decided that a CI scan is worth not publishing it? I would not have made that decision no matter what, and I'm not convinced that the article is not worthy of being published.
I have added a note in the article that the discussion should be checked. And I've logged an enhancement to automatically add notes to content when we exceed xx posts. The debates and arguments that come from many articles and questions, are worth reading. And I can only hope to point people in that direction.
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Adam Machanic (6/2/2009)
GSquared (6/2/2009)
The concept is crap, but I'd rather see it published and debunked than left out there.. . . . . . People believe, rightly or wrongly, that if an article is published--here or elsewhere--that the information must be good.
. . . . a lot more people are going to take the article at face value than are going to bother really digging into it.
But of course, that's just my opinion. And here we are in this debate thread. And now you can "roast" me right back. Enjoy. 😛
Adam,
I think you've made an excellent case here that a publisher has a responsibiltiy for the integrity of the material published. The trouble here seems to be that what gets published as a "article" is really vetted not much more carefully than any individual's blog on the web, yet has the imprimateur of being an SSC "Article".
You've suggested that Steve be more selective in what he publishes. I would suggest that since the site does not follow the academic or scientific discipline of having articles reviewed by jurors before publication, but rather follows the internet custom of opening discussion, that any more prior restraint than already exercised probably would not be appropriate.
But then, I agree that the "join the discussion" link is probably missed or ignored by too many people who could benefit tremendously from the comments made (as I certainly did with the dynamic sp article). So, with that in mind, perhaps SSC could make a possible modification to the Article template that may address that concern, that is, always show some of the discussion entries below the article. Many websites show the most recent few. SSC could do something like that or perhaps show the first two or three lines of each entry, limited to the most recent few or perhaps the first eight or ten responses. This would give the reader an immediate clue that there may be dissenting or supplemental information available.
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Steve Jones - Editor (6/2/2009)
I have added a note in the article that the discussion should be checked. And I've logged an enhancement to automatically add notes to content when we exceed xx posts. The debates and arguments that come from many articles and questions, are worth reading. And I can only hope to point people in that direction.
Ah. Good idea. I hadn't seen this before posting my response to Adam a few minutes ago.
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Steve;
I want you to know that I support your decision to publish that article and your reasoning behind it. I think that it's great that there is a place where unknown SQL practicioners can get published and make any technical presenatation or case that they want, even if others disagree with them.
All too often in the many years of my career I have seen some pundit, authority or whatever proclaim that something should not have been published because it was incorrect, only to have it turn out that the "authority" was wrong. The fact is, even the Gurus can be wrong, but here at SQLServerCentral, we all get treated the same. So I say damn the torpedoes, Steve, print it and let the chips fall where they may.
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font] -
I have to agree with Steve. Perhaps a disclaimer of some sort should be added to top of each article stating the content of the article is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of others on this site nor may reflect best practices. A suggestion to read the discuss thread for the article could also be included.
I may be one of the few that takes the time to check out the discussion thread of those articles I read. I like to see what others have to say, do they agree or disagree, is there another way to accomplish the same task, etc.
Personally, I don't think I would have any attempted to write an article if I knew it would have to vetted by a technical panel prior to publication on SSC. I have written two articles published here and have had two more more published on sswug.org (I just wish those were available to the general public, not just sswug.org members).
Steve, you have a terrific site here. If there are any changes that should be made, they should be minor. How you decide what is published isn't one of them. You encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and do things they may not do. I have started writing technical articles, I have stepped out trying to help others as well. Amazing how much you learn when you start pushing your own boundaries.
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[subjectchange]
Steve. Can you upload a new avatar photo please it looks like a photo in 16/256 colours - I'm sure its not my display settings as other peoples' avatars display well. (Unless, of course, you want that look for effect :hehe:)
[/subjectchange]
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Tom Brown (6/2/2009)
[subjectchange]Steve. Can you upload a new avatar photo please it looks like a photo in 16/256 colours - I'm sure its not my display settings as other peoples' avatars display well. (Unless, of course, you want that look for effect :hehe:)
[/subjectchange]
I may be wrong, but I think that that is intentional. Its an "artsy" thing, sort of like that Obama poster you see everywhere. Not that I'm an authority in Art or aesthetics, as several people have pointed out over the last week. 🙁
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font] -
www.befunky.com. I cartoon-ized my photo, so it looks funny.
Probably need a better picture, but I like that shirt 🙂
Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/way0utwest
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RBarryYoung (6/2/2009)
Tom Brown (6/2/2009)
[ Its an "artsy" thing, sort of like that Obama poster you see everywhere.Had to do a search for it, not having been to the US for over 15 years, I think found the one you mean - unusually it was listed as 'Soviet-esque'
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Roy Ernest (6/2/2009)
I dont think any of my articles would have been published in another site than here. Especially the Upsert I was trying to push as a good idea. (It is a debatable idea) 🙂Roy, it was a brilliant one.
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Adam Machanic (6/2/2009)
SSC is a major site, and each article gets thousands of hits. Most of the readers probably don't bother to look at the discussion at all, and of those that do, most probably aren't going to bother reading the whole thing, especially when they see that it's 10 pages long. So what we have is a site that a lot of people love to read, and come to trust after a while. People believe, rightly or wrongly, that if an article is published--here or elsewhere--that the information must be good.Now put yourself into Joe "I'm Way Too Busy to Read a Discussion" Developer's shoes. He's working on a new search stored procedure with 25 different optional parameters, doesn't know much about SQL Server but can hack his way around, and suddenly this article pops into his inbox. It's been published on his favorite SQL Server web site, so he knows that it's just gotta be good information--right? It tells him exactly what he needs to solve his problem... And it works perfectly when he tests it in the little dev environment. Rock on!
Adam, if Mr. Joe Developer reads an article that has been rated by his/her peers here at SSC with only 2 stars, and doesn't investigate why that article was rated so low, then IMHO, he deserves what he gets for failing to do his due diligence.
Steve, as I was typing this, I came up with an idea... Is there anyway that articles that have been rated below a certain level can have some kind of web site inserted mumbo-jumbo notice on the top of the page made to be quite prominent that peers at SSC have rated this article at a low level, and that the reader should treat the article lightly, and be sure to read the article discussion for why?
Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes
If you can't explain to another person how the code that you're copying from the internet works, then DON'T USE IT on a production system! After all, you will be the one supporting it!
Links:
For better assistance in answering your questions
Performance Problems
Common date/time routines
Understanding and Using APPLY Part 1 & Part 2 -
Reviewing articles on this site would also mean reviewing the referenced articles from other sites. Then there're blogs and answers to posts. Where should the reviewing and censorship stop?
Also consider that some of the SQL "pay sites" and some of the free forums that do have such reviews still have some of the worst answers ever (along with some good ones, too!). I particularly like the "performance tip" type of article on such sites where they use a bloody While Loop to build a test table. :pinch: Woo-hoo! 😛
I believe that anyone who has had access to the internet for more than about 30 seconds understands the idea of "caveat emptor" even on such great sites as this one. One of the (perhaps misunderstood) principles of this site is that you have to have some serious hair to post an article in front of over a million possible viewers and my hat is off to anyone who will try that hard because those million viewers are also potentially ready to provide you with some serious pork chop poisoning if you're wrong. It's an opportunity to present yourself in front of your peers worldwide that very few sites offer. Whether you make an idiot or a professor out of yourself is totally up to you.
I also believe that anyone who has had access to SQLServerCentral.com or any other free SQL forum for more than about 2 minutes also knows that the real value of articles posted, especially those that are dead wrong, come from the discussions that follow. Whether it's a friendly discussion, a heated battle between titans, or interminable dribble from "moroffs" (worse than a "moron" because they're more off than on :-P), there's always a least one thing more to be learned from those discussions than what came out in the original article. Sometimes, the discussion is about why the article is so wrong and that also has incredible value.
I agree with Steve and many of the others. The "free range", minimally censored type of article on this site, no matter how bad it may be, inspires other folks, especially "lurkers" and other first-timers, to take time out and share an idea here and there. If everyone wrote perfect articles, there would be no need for this or any other forum. The flip side of the coin is, if people knew they'd have to write the perfect article and that it would undergo a deep technical review, censorship, and re-submittal process with possible multiple iterations, some of the better authors may never have submitted an article.
I do agree that the truly uninitiated may miss or ignore warning signs like a low number of stars and may take a bad article to heart. With that in mind, perhaps some form of prominent disclaimer or advisory should appear above ALL article titles (not just the "bad" ones) along with the advice that what people really think of the article can be found by clicking on "Join the Discussion". Hmmm…. Maybe "Join the Discussion" should be changed to "See what others thought of this article."
Of course (still [font="Arial Black"]HINT[/font]ing), you don't have to worry about the truly uninitiated copying any bad code from an article or post because, if they truly are uninitiated, they're still using IE instead of FireFox and the code doesn't copy correctly when using IE. :-P;-)
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.
"Change is inevitable... change for the better is not".
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
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Create a Tally Function (fnTally)
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SQL Server Magazine just published an article by Itzik Ben-Gan where under certain conditions, a cursor-based approach scales out better than a set based one. I'm curious as to others thoughts about this, specifically if there are other set-based methods that will perform better than what was used in the article.
Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes
If you can't explain to another person how the code that you're copying from the internet works, then DON'T USE IT on a production system! After all, you will be the one supporting it!
Links:
For better assistance in answering your questions
Performance Problems
Common date/time routines
Understanding and Using APPLY Part 1 & Part 2 -
Jan Van der Eecken (6/2/2009)
Roy Ernest (6/2/2009)
I dont think any of my articles would have been published in another site than here. Especially the Upsert I was trying to push as a good idea. (It is a debatable idea) 🙂Roy, it was a brilliant one.
Thanks, Just something I push this idea with the development team here... 🙂
-Roy
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Adam:
I hate to sound so quantum (reference to today's cartoon from the front page), but I think the principle of publishing even when there are problems with it, is both right and wrong at the same time. Kind of like a lot of Wikipedia articles.
Yes, there probably are people who read the article, don't bother with the discussion, and implement it into production systems without testing.
At the same time, anyone without the wit and wisdom to realize that that's a bad idea, probably won't benefit from a better article either.
Steve:
I do like the idea of having a few of the more recent discussion posts visible below the article. Lots of sites do that, and while the posts often make no sense without seeing what they are a reply to, it at least lets you know there's a discussion, potentially a heated one, about the thing.
I think that would accomplish some of what Adam is aiming at (correctly), while still allowing people to publish with less pressure, like you want (correctly).
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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