The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Mike Chrestensen
- Tracy Boggiano
Notes: Questions and Topics
Solving a Data Problem
Mike had a data problem. Specifically, he had “parent” and “child” records in the same table. He knew which was a parent and which a child and he also knew that the children always came immediately after their parent alphabetically. The question is, how could he associate child records with their parents?
One easy answer to this is a concept called Last Observation Carried Forward (LOCF). LOCF is possible…in Azure SQL Edge. It’s now available in SQL Server 2022 but when we recorded this, Build had not yet happened and therefore we didn’t know anything about SQL Server 2022.
Fortunately, for those of you who didn’t immediately jump and put a first CTP into production, there are still solutions. Itzik Ben-Gan, naturally, has a solution. Specifically, he has two solutions but one of them was way more complex than I wanted to describe on the air.
Saying Goodbye to User Groups
Mala made the point that quite a few user groups have gone by the wayside these past couple of years. As things (slowly) begin to re-open, we’re seeing some user groups return from dormancy—for example, TriNUG, our local .NET user group, has started back up and you should stop on by one of these days. But for every TriNUG, there seem to be several groups whose leaders have given up the ghost. We talk a bit about why that can be.
New Doesn’t Mean Better
Our final topic of the night turned out to be an extended ranty discussion based on a really good blog post by Andy Leonard. The gist of Andy’s post is that novelty is not, strictly speaking, a virtue. A few of the highlights of this include:
- The benefits of old code
- Chesterton’s Fence, aka why you shouldn’t make rash decisions without sufficient information
- Ugly code is usually ugly for a reason and if you don’t understand that reason, your beautiful new code will get real ugly
- On the other side, technological decay does happen and things become obsolete
- Still, anybody pushing new technology is trying to cross the chasm and drag you along with it, whether it makes sense or not