March 2019

For over a decade, I have had a rack of servers which I have used for both personal and work related tasks. Indeed, here is a picture of my server rack from back in 2007 (with 6U of rack space containing what was at the time around $140K worth of high-end network switches).

Common Table Expressions, or CTEs as they are often called, are an area of SQL which can by some be considered to be no different than magic. This is because few of us use them, and even fewer of us use them regularly enough to make them like the familiar of some powerful wizard in some book. And just like those familiars sometimes do in the books, they can give us great frustration or even turn upon us like some demon or Djinn who has escaped the bounds we thought would control them.

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about why I use windows. Here is part of why I hate it, and why I do so less than willingly (to put it mildly).