The Twilight Report

Jay, who is the only contact I have at the new grander IdeaBank sends me an e-mail this morning:

If I insert a new row into the quote table is there anything I have to 
do to make it work in queries??

INSERT INTO quote VALUES (
'Kazoo',
'kazoo:dino:barney:slate:wilma:fred:betty',
(SELECT MAX(id)+1 FROM quote),
'kazoo dino barney slate',
'kazoo
dino
barney
slate
wilma
fred
betty' );


We ran this, and when we do a search (from the web site) on kazoo or 
slate it isn't found.

To which I responded with... well actually I didn’t respond, and in case anyone else is wondering: no I won’t do your homework for you either. This guy is getting paid to do this, but if I saw this on a newsgroup I would strongly suspect the guy was trying to get someone to do his homework for him. That is how good his SQL is.

Also, maybe you shouldn’t be tinkering with a production server that you know nothing about? Definitely feeling the Schadenfreude when I connected to the website and the dynamic content was broken due to a server configuration error. But then, that is what you get when you buy custom software and hire some hack with no experience in the languages it was written in to run it instead of the original author who knows it better than anyone.

If it were Chuck still in charge, I would probably give Jay some pointers (I actually know why it isn’t working from the snippet he provided), but I have no loyalty to (or compensation from) this company, and definitely not to Jay.