There's an old joke...

[johnpalmer]

"How can you tell when (stereotype one) is at a cockfight? S/he enters a duck.
"How can you tell when (stereotype two) is at a cockfight? S/he bets on the duck.
"How can you tell when the mob is at a cockfight? The duck wins."

How can you tell when your SQL engineer is inexperienced? He promises to find the slowdown in a query, just from the query plan.

How can you tell when your engineer is stubborn? He investigates the 750,000 line query plan to see if I can make good on his word. (Query plans can have a lot of lines normally, and you don't read them like you read lines of code, for example. But digging into 2000 lines of query plan output would be a very large task.)

Alas, here's where the analogy breaks down, because it wasn't with the help of the mob that I found the problem :-).

I'm humble enough to admit it - it was luck. But if I hadn't been good enough, the luck wouldn't have helped. And now I've learned to be a bit more careful about what I tell customers I can do :-) .

(Oh, and did I mention I accomplished this while zoned on muscle relaxant, for my spasming hip?)

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

But: You *are* a genius, my dear. (-:

(And yay for the muscle relaxant; I hope it's helping.)

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

select "successful_outcome"
from mob.duck
where engineer = "miracle_worker";

:-)

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Well done - though personally I tend to feel large doses of muscle relaxant can *help* this sort of process, rather than hinder....