I hate Oracle

It is officially the most retarded thing ever. Very fussy with GROUP BY and doesn’t like LIMIT. I’ve been helping Laska with it the last two days, and it’s stressful. After spending several hours getting queries working on MySQL, we find that Oracle is retarded and doesn’t like most of them.

The main problem is that with GROUP BY in your SELECT queries, you have to group every column except count(), min(), max(), etc. generated columns. LIMIT in Oracle is done by putting everything in a subquery and use WHERE rownum. For example:

SELECT * FROM (SELECT * FROM oracle_users ORDER BY stress DESC) WHERE rownum <= 5

This would get a list of the top 5 most stressed people in the oracle_users table.

Though it feels great when everything works just as it should. :D

Update: The final SQL query came in at 2205 bytes. This is to look up a list of players teams, then figure out how many games they won and how many they lost, and calculate the difference.

The 64th Messenger

I installed MSN Messenger 7.0. What a mistake. It turns out it sucks. Though I am impressed that there is a “personal message”, so finally annoying people who like to have meaningless display names have somewhere to put them. Too bad that not everyone has installed it, or just still has to be annoying and use them.

There seems to be more cruft, with built in offers to pay for premade avatars and other junk. Nudges and Winks bring all the junk that is in Messenger Plus to regular folk for constant overuse and misuse. Maybe we just want a messenger program, with no stupid things like Flash animations in messages with sound, and without having people poke you contstantly. Maybe if you’re not responding to messages you’re actually away or just don’t want to be bugged.

Then there’s a really crappy review of Windows “we can’t correctly name the amd64 architecture” Edition. They note all the fun issues of running an operating system on a non-i386, like, shock horror: iTunes’ iPod driver only runs on i386 as it is a kernel module compiled for i386, lolz, and not amd64. They also had some very poor benchmarking as they forgot that just because you run a 64-bit OS doesn’t mean that your existing 32-bit applications will run any faster. They use this as a gauge that performance will tottally suck in everything.

I’ll just stick to Linux anyway thanks. They were here first, and there seems to be very few applications that actually are compiled native. It seems that Windows has the problems Linux has with some vendors who only support i386. However due to Windows closed source nature, those problems are multiplied by 100, as there’s no option of a recompile and a little patching.

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