Can't stop laughing.... Brilliant post...

These foreign Indian scammers keep calling me about "computer virus".

Today, the guy told me to press ctrl + Windows key. I told him I use Arch Linux and then told him I use Netscape as my browser, and he still didn't take the hint.

He asked me "how can you have the Windows key on your keyboard and use Linux?".

#stupidfuck

I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.

Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.

I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.

They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.

I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.

I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.

I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.

At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.

One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.

I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.

I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.

TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.

Live long and prosper. Peace.

Time for an actual rant:

During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.

When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.

Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.

And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.

And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.

The coolest project I've worked on was for a certain country's Navy. The project itself was cool and I'll talk about it below but first, even cooler than the project was the place were I worked on it.

I would go to this island off the coast where the navy had its armoury. Then to get into the armoury I'd go through this huge tunnel excavated in solid rock.

Finally, once inside I would have to go thru the thickest metal doors you've ever seen to get to crypto room, which was a tiny room with a bunch of really old men - cryptographers - scribbling math formulae all day long.

I can't give a lot of technical details on the project for security reasons but basically it was a bootable CD with a custom Linux distro on it. Upon booting up the system would connect to the Internet looking for other nodes (other systems booted with that CD). The systems would find each other and essentially create an ad-hoc "dark net".

The scenario was that some foreign force would have occupied the country and either destroyed or taken control of the Navy systems. In this case, some key people would boot these CDs in some PC somewhere not under foreign control (and off the navy grounds.) This would supposedly allow them to establish secure communications between surviving officers. There is a lot more to it but that's a good harmless outline.

As a bonus, I got to tour an active aircraft carrier :)

"forget this foreign key relation thing. It is really annoying if you want to delete entries..."

Coworker: so once the algorithm is done I will append new columns in the sql database and insert the output there

Me: I don't like that, can we put the output in a separate table and link it using a foreign key. Just to avoid touching the original data, you know, to avoid potential corruption.

C: Yes sure.

< Two days later - over text >

C: I finished the algo, i decided to append it to the original data in order to avoid redundancy and save on space. I think this makes more sense.

Me: ahdhxjdjsisudhdhdbdbkekdh

No. Learn this principal:
" The original data generated by the client, should be treated like the god damn Bible! DO NOT EVER CHANGE ITS SCHEMA FOR A 3RD PARTY CALCULATION! "

Put simply: D.F.T.T.O
Don't. Fucking. Touch. The. Origin!

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

My most satisfying bug fix?

I found a core concurrency issue in this gnarly homegrown ORM and reported it to the lead devs, who (very defensively, having written the damn thing) argued that it would never pop up in a prod environment and I was stupid for even bringing it up. Theoretically, this bug could cause pretty much every foreign key to be assigned to the wrong parent, but only if multiple instances of the application were open/running at once. They were so certain it would never happen on live that they explicitly instructed me not to fix it. After all, this bug had been active for many years on a previous project and nobody complained.

Problem was, that previous project was something that only a single user had open most of the time (think: a manager). The new project was something that would be used by multiple people at the same time (think: all the employees). Once we released this new-project-with-old-orm, it didn't take long at all for our customers to start complaining.

After that, they let me fix the bug. :)

So I need to "fix" a false-positive security warning (mass-assignment of a foreign key). Do I "fix" it by...

A) Setting it manually and double-saving the object?
B) Rewriting the mass-assignment so the linter doesn't realize what I'm doing?

Both options suck.
But security is going to complain if I don't do it.

Guess what?
I'm not doing it.

SMD you ducks.

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

Cannot believe I am paying for a course with a lecturer that doesn't even teach the students what a foreign key is, or the concept of a join table to breakdown many-to-many relationships in a database. Literally telling me "If thats how you interpreted it, it's ok to add that in, but you dont have to." In relation to adding a new entity into the ER Diagram as a join table.

It isn't up for interpretation, you are literally joining tables based on foreign keys that will create duplication and make no sense. I mean, you are teaching people who have likely never worked with DB's before... you cannot teach them this. 🤦‍♀️

Everything about the company is a mess. The only thing that is decent is the people. And by that I mean they aren't shit.
Workflows are fucked.
Clients are fucked. You're pressuring me to get this shit production ready before new year's eve and you still don't know what the text should say and want to make changes to the UI? The fuck?!
Design is a complete shit show. There is a design team. They only make a fucking psd to show clients how an interface would look like. No mobile version (but it's still expected to work!), no markup. Resolution is fucking inconsistent and whenever a change is requested, they are nowhere to be seen so I have to actually do designing on top of having to use this worthless fucking framework I hate it so much.
Codebases are turbo-fucked because of said framework.
Databases are an inconsistent, fucked up mess. No foreign key constraints because every single fucking table is using the MyISAM engine.

And the thing that really makes me incredibly angry is all the "custom systems" look the fucking same at the database level. Like 30 fucking useless tables made for stupid HR workflows that make no fucking sense.

went on contract for an insurance company to build their new platform. looking at the current system, found that they used lookup tables but they were putting the "description" column of the lookup into the main tables. I said that they should be putting a foreign key reference into these tables and the senior developers response... "then it would come up with a number rather than the description when I query the table"

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

"I'll just create these two tables without a foreign key. Nothing else will ever need this data except my app."

Another app looking at those two tables filled with information it needs:

IT'S CAPS RANT TIME!
MYSQL ERRORS ARE SO USELESS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

I JUST WANT TO ADD A FOREIGN KEY BUT 'Cannot add foreign key constraint' KEEPS COMING UP, AND THE STACK OVERFLOW ANSWERS INDICATE THAT IT COULD BE -LITERALLY- ANYTHING!

THIS IS OF COURSE, AFTER PHPMYADMIN GIVES ITS OWN ERRORS FOR TRYING TO USE THE DESIGNER TO ADD THE RELATION. IT ONLY WANTS UNIQUE FOREIGN KEYS, DESPITE ONE OF THE MAIN USES OF FOREIGN KEYS BEING MANY-TO-MANY AND ONE-TO-MANY RELATIONS!

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

Why is school such a bullfuck, we've learned SQL basics and I've used SQL a little so I thought I won't have a problem. WELL FUCKING HELL WAS I WRONG. Joining 4 tables together with inner join WTF who the fuck uses that, why the fuck do I need to know this, WHY THE FUCK IN A TEST WHEN WE HAVEN'T LEARNED SUCH BULLSHIT. Well how about adding a foreign key to a table that doesnt need one. Well ok have fun with a key that does absolutely nothing and on top of all those convoluted tasks the texts are a mess, they give unnecessary information with grammar of a 9 year old and the pictures are not even readable. They are fucking hieroglyphs.
Fuck school.
Gonna do it by myself at the end anyway.
Fuck everything.

So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.

During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.

Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!

FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

I can't convince my team that a good database model promotes a good API design and a good UI/UX experience.

Instead, I have to work with a ridiculous table setup.

Imagine, if you will, a table (table B) that references another table (table A) via a foreign key. The FK is a string in both tables. And table A only has one column, which is labeled as "name".

The schema i have to look at it kind of like this:

Table parent
Name varchar(10) primary key

Table child
Name varchar (10),
parent_name varchar(10),
Foreign key (parent_name) references parent (name)

Sorry if the syntax is wrong, a little frustrated having to look at it...

Am I crazy to want to change this table design? Am I missing something? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because this is just scratching the surface of the problems I have to deal with.

Screw this guy. Really.

(It's no foreign key, it's the actual id column.)

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

How to destroy all table data:

* Get a database;
* Add the first table;
* Add the second table;
* Create a foreign key in second table that delete a record where there is a delete in the first table;
* Update all data in the first table with a REPLACE command.

Miracle: all data is lost

Developing nanosatellite to be launched with foreign company.
The ICD (Interface Control Document, basically guidelines regarding design) is clear, but there are some key points we needed to ask with the launcher.

I've sent email to ask them regarding those questions

Then got a reply saying that it'll be forwarded to the engineering team.

That's it. 2 weeks in, no reply. Tried emailing them again to nudge them, no reply, resent the email the following week.
Still waiting till today.

Please reply me 😂😂😂

Interesting...

On Friday, I was playing with the ChatGPT integration in DBeaver. I was using the DBeaver sample SQLite database. This database has a couple of tables, among them Album and Artist, where Album has a foreign key into Artist.

So, I asked it:

"give me a query that lists all albums from artists who's name starts with s"

The query I got back was:

SELECT * FROM Album

Uhh, okay.

But then, I noticed that I wrote "who's" instead of 'whose', which would be proper grammatically. So, I changed that, and then I got this query:

SELECT * FROM Album WHERE ArtistId IN (SELECT ArtistId FROM Artist WHERE Name LIKE 'S%');

Hooray, that works! I'm not sure it's the best way to write the query... I might have written:

SELECT * FROM album a, artist r WHERE a.artistid=r.artistid AND r.name LIKE 'S%'

...I'd have to check to see if one performs better than the other, and consider which syntax I find clearer, but that's a separate issue, it's just nice to see a working, reasonable query generated because that's the point, after all.

But I found it interesting that such a minor error would cause it to not work, that's my main point.

Interestingly, it seems to have learned: I just tried the same thing, and I got the right query either way. So that's pretty cool.

It's a pretty neat feature and I can see some legitimate value in it. I'm pretty good writing SQL myself... I've managed to write some truly hideously complex queries over the years... but there are definitely instances I can recall where the query didn't seem obvious at the start, and having an AI that can MAYBE produce something that is AT LEAST a starting point is definitely something I can get onboard with.

What the fuck?? Just spending 3 fucking hours to make a trigger in MySQL... and discovering now in website of this fucking DBMS there is "Cascaded foreign key actions do not activate triggers." Why??????

Developing on a legacy system today and found that not only did their MySQL db not have foreign key relationships, but one to many relationships were created by adding a concatenated string of pks to the table. Oh and they were concatenated with fucking dots!

I'm studying Databases and I'm getting confused about Foreign Key.
A Foreign Key made reference to Primary Key of another table. But what's the point? Can't I simply use a value and select requested data where TableA value is equal to TableB value?
Sorry if I didn't explain it well, I'm so confused lmao

"Let's join two views and create a custom column that acts as a primary key so that other tables can treat it like a foreign key" said no dev ever.

Or at least I had thought that until today when I started figuring out why our queries are so goddamn slow. I hate the previous devs so much.

How do you feel about not creating database tables for objects that only exist in relations?

For example, I have made a wiki engine. Because nothing on wiki pages can actually change, they aren't an entity. Revisions are an entity, and they refer to the title of the page which was changed. The same application also includes two non-version-controlled directed graphs between the pages (element of category and navigation log), which are represented by tables that link two titles. Of course the indexes are all set up so that it works like a foreign key would, but there is no Page or Article table.

I wonder if I should add to my bachelor thesis' implementation report that I had trouble setting up my SQL init script and lost around a day because I made a typo in a table-name and therefore my foreign key kept fsiling for unknown reasons 😂

Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..

I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...

Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..

Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.

I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.

On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.

Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.

Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.

And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.

I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.

And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.

For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.

This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.

I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.

1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution

2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.

3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory

4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.

I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.

This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).

Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.

Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.

For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.

I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.

LOVE YOU ALL :)

The bugs that make you think are the best/worst.

Had a ghost foreign key constraint from a dropped table. Cant drop it from a non existant table.

Turns out the dev copied a file for the new table and since you can technically name those foreign keys anything you want, there were no errors when he ran it.

Also sloppy/overworked dev teammates are the worst...

Also I'm pretty sure rule 2 of programming is "Never Copy and Paste"

So,
sqlite lets you violate foreign key constraints on insert.
so you then can't delete the row you added
which has absolutely no child data so it shouldn't be preventing you from deleting it.

wtf.

When RoundhousE throws an error saying specified schema doesn't exist and after 2 hours debugging realise it's actually an ambiguous foreign key name. What the fuck?

# ./symfony test:unit

Propel-Exception: Unable to execute DELTE ALL statement [...] Integrity constraint violation: 1451 Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails.

WHY ist a UNIT TEST reaching out to a REAL data base?
And who in their right mind would create a different data base schema for the tests?
This was with a clone of the real thing. Removing the FK results in double PK-errors...

Why the hell SQLite foreign key disable by default?!
Zzzz

Finishing work on a Friday when cascade delete won't cascade delete in EF and throws foreign key issues. That's my weekend doomed to be spent obsessing over why.

Piss.

(tldr: are foriegn keys good/bad? Can you give a simple example of a situation where foriegn keys were the only and/or best solution?)

i have been recently trying to make some apps and their databases , so i decided to give a deeper look to sql and its queries.

I am a little confused and wanted to know more about foreign keys , joins and this particular db designing technique i use.

Can anyone explain me about them in a simpler way?
Firstly i wanted to show you this not much unheard tecnique of making relations that i find very useful( i guess its called toxi technique) :
In this , we use an extra table for joining 2 tables . For eg, if we have a table of questions and we have a table of tags then we should also have a table of relation called relation which will be mapping the the tags with questions through their primary IDs this way we can search all the questions by using tag name and we can also show multiple tags for a question just like stackoverflow does.

Now am not sure which could be a possibile situation when i need a foriegn key. In this particular example, both questions and tags are joined via what i say as "soft link" and this makes it very scalable and both easy to add both questions and new tags.

From what i learned about foriegn keys, it marks a mandatory one directional relation between 2 tables (or as i say "hard a to b" link)
Firstly i don't understand how i could use foriegn key to map multiple tags with a question. Does that mean it will always going to make a 1to1 relationship between 2 tables( i have yet to understand what 11 1mant or many many relations arr, not sure if my terminology is correct)

Secondly it poses super difficulty and differences in logics for adding either a tag or question, don't you think?
Like one table (say question) is having a foreign key of tags ID then the the questions table is completely independent of tag entries.

Its insertion/updation/deletion/creation of entries doesn't affect the tags table. but for tag table we cannot modify a particular tag or delete a tag without making without causing harm to its associated question entries.
if we have to delete a particular tag then we have to delete all its associated questions with that this means this is rather a bad thing to use for making tables isn't it?

I m just so confused regarding foriegn keys , joins and this toxi approach. Maybe my example of stack overflow tag/questions is wrong wrt to foreign key. But then i would like to know an example where it is useful