Thats exactly the problem we had at a company I contracted for. I did manage to write one sp with about 15 parameters but it was a royal pain as you had to put together the SQL dynamically anyway. For cases where it is manageable I put together the dynamic string and used sp_executesql instead of exec.
I prefer to use stored procedures where possible, but found in some places, like the huge parameterized queries its easier (and sometimes faster performance wise) to just put together the SQL like you said above.
Eh, wrong. Sorry, you must be from Ontario, maybe you should do a bit more travelling.. I suggest east to the maritimes where we have very small populations in our cities. Take New Brunswick for instance, hardly a city that qualified for you 70,000 but we have one and sometimes two Walmart's per city. Halifax is likely the only city with a large population (around 300,000 I believe).
I've seen this argument from both sides of the fence every single time there is a discussion on Slashdot about College vs University (diploma vs degree) education. It seems that every time the same crap gets pulled out. The university crowd pulls out the "cookie cutter diploma" stereotype, and the college or even high school crowd pulls out the "I have 30 years of experience and I think uni's don't know crap". As somebody with a bachelor and masters in CS, who also has worked for 2.5 years in industry running my own soft dev company I've come across these universal truths
1). Not every university educated Comp Scientist is smart 2). Not every college or self-educated person is dumb
I've gone to university with, and worked with some very dumb Comp Sci's. These tend to be the people who copied or nearly copied every assignment they did, and who basically was either very good at memorization or they studied off old mid-terms and finals and the prof simply changed very little from year to year. These people I do not consider to be true computer scientists, rather they are just people who "went" to university for 4 or 5 years and came out with a piece of paper and no skills.
I've also known and interviewed some very intelligent college and self-educated people. These people tend to be very smart BEFORE they went to college. What they learned in college was basically that they can pretty much learn anything given enough time and some good resources. These people will eventually learn just as much as your comp sci grad given enough time in industry or self-study.
Conversely, I've met some pretty brain dead code monkeys in my day and I'm always disappointed with how little thought these people put in their designs. For the most part, they simply code "what works" or "I found this code on the internet". It doesn't scale up, its horridly inefficient, it has little reuse, and it takes me about 2 minutes to rewrite their 100 lines of code into 20. These people are only slightly less useful than the university crowd that "went to university and got a piece of paper".
I was hired last year to supplement the IT staff at a company in the US (I'm in Canada). Since I had a good grounding in CS theory I conducted skill screening interviews. I had a small section of CS theory questions which I thought were pretty basic like "What is the difference between a Hash Table and a Linked List" and "Give an example of an X^2 algorithm and how it differs from a linear". I didn't place much weight on these questions, I was just trying to see if I could find anybody with a good grounding in CS theory among the bunch (none had a CS degree, their pay was too low to get anybody but the diploma crowd fresh out of school). There were 15 applicants and only 1 could talk about any of these questions intelligently. I found that pretty sad.
About your comment that people with degrees tend to be less flexible, I found the direct opposite. In my experience people with a good background tend to love learning new things, as they have the background to be able to understand them quickly. Myself, I find it great when a client or an employer asks me to use a language I don't know. I've found the opposite with college grads, they don't like to venture outside their comfort zone. However, I don't doubt you've run into the situation you describe as well.
I've rambled for enough now so I'll end on these remarks:
People with an aptitude for software development will be good developers/architects/testers/whatever regardless of the amount of education they received. University was only ever meant as a way for people to "learn from the mistakes and experiences of others". Its not a magically fairy land where you insert one brain dead idiot and out comes the master of code. People who don't go to university tend to get their experiences out in industry or by reading books. People who graduated from university do the same only they should have gotten a head start if they treated their education se
Actually I heard on the radio this morning that somebody is taking it to the book publishers over the fact that their Canadian prices still reflect an exchange rate of about $0.65. I'm hoping prices start to change across the board.
As somebody who lives in Canada, and is paid in US dollars (I do a lot of soft dev for US companies from the comfort of my own home), I'm getting tired of getting reamed on both ends. One, my US dollars are now only getting 10 cents on the dollar, and two, I'm still paying for goods that are priced as if I'm still getting 35 cents on the dollar.
Argh!
Hey, don't you know you are not allowed to talk about Orimulsion anymore, Hay said so. He told us to stop whining and suck it up and pay more, likely b/c he needs more money to build up his eventual severance. And besides, the rate hike isn't b/c of the Orimulsion deal it's because we resedentials customers haven't been paying our fair share.
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Thats exactly the problem we had at a company I contracted for. I did manage to write one sp with about 15 parameters but it was a royal pain as you had to put together the SQL dynamically anyway. For cases where it is manageable I put together the dynamic string and used sp_executesql instead of exec. I prefer to use stored procedures where possible, but found in some places, like the huge parameterized queries its easier (and sometimes faster performance wise) to just put together the SQL like you said above.
Eh, wrong. Sorry, you must be from Ontario, maybe you should do a bit more travelling .. I suggest east to the maritimes where we have very small populations in our cities. Take New Brunswick for instance, hardly a city that qualified for you 70,000 but we have one and sometimes two Walmart's per city. Halifax is likely the only city with a large population (around 300,000 I believe).
*shrug* ... Ah, I know I had to specifically go in and select it since it was not a mandatory install.
I've seen this argument from both sides of the fence every single time there is a discussion on Slashdot about College vs University (diploma vs degree) education. It seems that every time the same crap gets pulled out. The university crowd pulls out the "cookie cutter diploma" stereotype, and the college or even high school crowd pulls out the "I have 30 years of experience and I think uni's don't know crap". As somebody with a bachelor and masters in CS, who also has worked for 2.5 years in industry running my own soft dev company I've come across these universal truths
1). Not every university educated Comp Scientist is smart
2). Not every college or self-educated person is dumb
I've gone to university with, and worked with some very dumb Comp Sci's. These tend to be the people who copied or nearly copied every assignment they did, and who basically was either very good at memorization or they studied off old mid-terms and finals and the prof simply changed very little from year to year. These people I do not consider to be true computer scientists, rather they are just people who "went" to university for 4 or 5 years and came out with a piece of paper and no skills.
I've also known and interviewed some very intelligent college and self-educated people. These people tend to be very smart BEFORE they went to college. What they learned in college was basically that they can pretty much learn anything given enough time and some good resources. These people will eventually learn just as much as your comp sci grad given enough time in industry or self-study.
Conversely, I've met some pretty brain dead code monkeys in my day and I'm always disappointed with how little thought these people put in their designs. For the most part, they simply code "what works" or "I found this code on the internet". It doesn't scale up, its horridly inefficient, it has little reuse, and it takes me about 2 minutes to rewrite their 100 lines of code into 20. These people are only slightly less useful than the university crowd that "went to university and got a piece of paper".
I was hired last year to supplement the IT staff at a company in the US (I'm in Canada). Since I had a good grounding in CS theory I conducted skill screening interviews. I had a small section of CS theory questions which I thought were pretty basic like "What is the difference between a Hash Table and a Linked List" and "Give an example of an X^2 algorithm and how it differs from a linear". I didn't place much weight on these questions, I was just trying to see if I could find anybody with a good grounding in CS theory among the bunch (none had a CS degree, their pay was too low to get anybody but the diploma crowd fresh out of school). There were 15 applicants and only 1 could talk about any of these questions intelligently. I found that pretty sad.
About your comment that people with degrees tend to be less flexible, I found the direct opposite. In my experience people with a good background tend to love learning new things, as they have the background to be able to understand them quickly. Myself, I find it great when a client or an employer asks me to use a language I don't know. I've found the opposite with college grads, they don't like to venture outside their comfort zone. However, I don't doubt you've run into the situation you describe as well.
I've rambled for enough now so I'll end on these remarks:
People with an aptitude for software development will be good developers/architects/testers/whatever regardless of the amount of education they received. University was only ever meant as a way for people to "learn from the mistakes and experiences of others". Its not a magically fairy land where you insert one brain dead idiot and out comes the master of code. People who don't go to university tend to get their experiences out in industry or by reading books. People who graduated from university do the same only they should have gotten a head start if they treated their education se
Actually I heard on the radio this morning that somebody is taking it to the book publishers over the fact that their Canadian prices still reflect an exchange rate of about $0.65. I'm hoping prices start to change across the board. As somebody who lives in Canada, and is paid in US dollars (I do a lot of soft dev for US companies from the comfort of my own home), I'm getting tired of getting reamed on both ends. One, my US dollars are now only getting 10 cents on the dollar, and two, I'm still paying for goods that are priced as if I'm still getting 35 cents on the dollar. Argh!
Hey, don't you know you are not allowed to talk about Orimulsion anymore, Hay said so. He told us to stop whining and suck it up and pay more, likely b/c he needs more money to build up his eventual severance. And besides, the rate hike isn't b/c of the Orimulsion deal it's because we resedentials customers haven't been paying our fair share.