The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
SQL Saturday Survey
Our first topic was a SQL Saturday survey that Steve Rezhener put together and that Steve Jones has promoted. I do recommend filling out the survey, and you can also view the results. Some of the questions on the survey were a bit of a challenge to understand, so I think that has limited the number of responses (in fact, Anders quit about halfway through the survey for that reason). But the information is potentially useful for getting a pulse of where SQL Saturday attendees are in terms of their current capabilities, as well as an idea of what types of sessions might be interesting to include.
Along the way, I talked a little bit about designing surveys, took some potshots at DB2, learned from Solomon that some of my cheap shots at DB2 around 8-character column names are no longer valid, and dove into how ranking mechanisms work for sites like DB-Engines and why its results might so radically differ from the Stack Overflow survey. Populations matter a lot for surveying.
Paginated Queries
The other major topic came from Tracy, despite her not being on the show this time around. She wanted to talk a bit about pagination and OFFSET/FETCH in particular. I happen to have a talk that includes pagination techniques and went into detail on how each works and the expected performance profile for each one. OFFSET/FETCH is fine for systems where you don’t have a huge number of pages, or where people rarely go past the first few pages. But it performs steadily worse the farther in a person goes, as it requires scanning all of the offset records and then pulling in the fetch records. I also lamented how much of a challenge pagination is, and how there are so few really good patterns for it given how common a technique it is and how important it is for websites.