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martin_hughes wrote: 
Yeah, totally. What was the reasoning behind it?
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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I shall endeavour to find out... but I fear the answer 
"It was the day before today.... I remember it like it was yesterday."
-Moleman
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That's similar to an Excel-based puddle-of-crap I have to support now. Each worksheet has entries for dates up to early this September, there's a formula for determining which row to work on for each date. The problem is that I don't think I can add more rows, so to extend the supported timeframe I'll have to delete the oldest data.
Be glad you are at least dealing with a ::cough:: database ::cough::.
"Always look on the bright side of life." -- Monty Python
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I'm sort of going off on a tangent here, but this reminds me of a most excellent Dilbert stripe a while ago. The pointy-haired boss has called an engineer into his office and says:
Boss: My spreadsheet shows your job performance hasn't been very good lately.
Engineer: Perhaps your spreadsheet is poorly conceived and does not capture the complexity of the real world.
Boss: (silence)
Engineer: And let's not forget the near certainty that your formulae are pointing to the wrong cells.
Cracked me up!
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Is there a DateUpdated table too, or do the two columns share a table, Gasp! You need to fix any such rampant denormalization before you migrate the "database"
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book,
only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Andy Brummer wrote: fix any such rampant denormalization before you migrate the "database"
Right on. Anyone up for denormalizing? 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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Andy Brummer wrote: You need to fix any such rampant denormalization before you migrate the "database"
Having spent a couple of hours ruminating, I'm thinking about returing an "unfeasible" on this feasability report 
"It was the day before today.... I remember it like it was yesterday."
-Moleman
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Have you thought of beginning the report with the phrase "Oh my God! What idiot..."??
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: Have you thought of beginning the report with the phrase "Oh my God! What idiot..."?
I am sure that would go over well with some PHB management wienie..
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Paul Conrad wrote: wienie..
The key word being "wienie". If he/she's a wienie, then they have no sense of humor and I would have to leave the company because of this personal condition, which I find hostile to my own creativity and motivation.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: If he/she's a wienie, then they have no sense of humor and I would have to leave the company because of this personal condition, which I find hostile to my own creativity and motivation.
I hear ya. I cannot imagine going through life without having a daily hearty laugh. I usually denote those kind of laughs in these forums with
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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To bad you can't tell them...
"I took it out behind the barn and shot it. Now I'm writing a brand spanking-new database."
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TheDailyWTF taught me that a "Date" table as such is not uncommon in business applications.
Since it's expensive to calculate holidays, business days, etc. they are calculated upfront and put into a date table that aids queries such as "next business day after" (maybe through a trigger when adding a previously unknown date, or through a script generating all dates up to 2015).
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Yikes!
Although I can see a specific reason for adding a calendar of company holidays, what you've found out scares me silly! Afterall, I might encounter more of this shite in the years to come!
"It was the day before today.... I remember it like it was yesterday."
-Moleman
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Actually, I found the most interesting exercise in reading TDWTF is reading the comments until someone comes up with a perfectly possible situation where the horrid solution is the one/usual/only/common way to go.
martin_hughes wrote: Afterall, I might encounter more of this shite in the years to come!
Love waht you can't change
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martin_hughes wrote: Yikes!
Exactly what I thought after reading the post by peterchen. People must think it is better to have a lookup table rather than computing the dates...
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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Oh, well that's alright then. But the keys should be GUIDs and there should be additional columns to indicate whether it's a government or religious holiday (and if religious, then which) and all sorts of things like that... Sounds like my NumberAttribute class (or whatever the name is).
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A Date table is daft. An Exclusive set is easier to manage than Inclusive set. Better off having a table with all the holidays in it, and manage the weekend checks in code.
But i don't know the caveats. I'm sure dumping every single date from now till the end of time into a table is not an efficient way of doing it.
-------------------------------
Carrier Bags - 21st Century Tumbleweed.
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Hell I just rewrote a function I found that was calculating a Spot Date (2 Working days forwrd from the Deal date in FX trading).
It worked on an Exclusive set as you say, but instead of getting all of the holidays for the specific currencies (of which there is always 2 and always known in advance) and working with that. It looped adding a day until it did not get a count > 0 from an SQL statement like this and it is a weekday.
Select count(CurrencyId) from Holiday Where holidayDate = '2007/01/01'
where it changed the date forward.
To work out one spot date over the christmas period it would open, query close anything up to 4 or 5 times per confirmation. Crazy I tell ya.
You will be pleased to note that it no longer does this 
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Some Sort Of Myan Calendar?
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"When normalization goes wrong. Horribly"
With that title, I expected to see an old "Far Side" cartoon!
The example is pretty funny either way.
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A selected set of programmers always exist who are always inclined to enrage us. A friend of mine, who is working in Bangalore in a small company wanted a third party review of a bit of code. I helped him out during the previous weekend.
A very interesting observation. A developer had accessed a particular DB item from Cache. When we asked him what happens if the Cache gets NULL, he was telling the following points:
1) The cache never gets NULL.
2) When the cache item *misses out*, we have to restart the IIS or Windows so that on next attempt, cache would be replenished.
A simple automatic NULL check, cache replenish and DB call was at all required. I don't know what caused him to spin this story. I guesses are:
1) He was trying to 'cover' his blunder.
2) He was sincerely ignorant over the Web fundamentals.
3) He was of the opinion that We, the Web server administrators and program managers are just dumb cabbages who have nothing to do but just have thier asses glued to the chairs near the server monitor 365x24x7.
Any other speculations?
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Nah, all you have to do is recycle the application worker process more frequently than the cache expiry time 
Assuming ASP.NET of course.
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And have a whole football park full of servers to keep the website running...
I bet Bill has some cash lying around somewhere.
WM.
What about weapons of mass-construction?
"What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
My blog
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Vasudevan Deepak Kumar wrote: dumb cabbages who have nothing to do but just have thier asses glued to the chairs
Said idiot needs to look in a mirror.
--
You have to explain to them [VB coders] what you mean by "typed". their first response is likely to be something like, "Of course my code is typed. Do you think i magically project it onto the screen with the power of my mind?" --- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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