OMG!  The beautiful, climbable, plum tree in our back yard has fallen over due to the weight of the snow in it’s horizontally sprawling branches, exacerbated by the rapid moisture build up overnight (after a day of cold, blowing snow we went into a night with thawing temperatures high enough that the snow melt off the roof dripped so fast it sounded like a rain storm).

It was such a nice tree too. It produced the most delicious and juicy plums in the summer that I used to make some yummy jam.  It’s such a pity.  Nathan is quite devastated – he and his friends loved to play in that tree. (On the plus side, we are moving into a place with a cheaper rent at the end of January anyway, so Nathan wouldn’t have had much time to go climbing again anyway.)

In addition to that immediately obvious destruction, a visual inspection around the house has also turned up the fact that the outer cross beam of the shelter behind our back door has also broken and the umbrella tree in the front yard may have lost branches on one side.  Ron’s going to be going out shortly to knock snow off both structures to reduce any further damage (the second cross beam of the shelter is bending dangerously and appears to be starting to crack) and possibly rescue the umbrella tree if the branches have not actually broken yet.

I do feel sorry for our landlord. That tree was one of the big selling points about this place, because it neatly divided the yard into a sunny half and a shady half making it a great place for barbeques and for kids to play. Especially as, last year at this time, he had to replace all the fences around the yard because the wind storms we had last winter blew them over. That said, when we moved in we mentioned that all the trees were quite tall and really needed to be professionally trimmed to keep them healthy and strong and he wasn’t willing to do it. In this case, he wasn’t even willing to reimburse us if we decided to have it done and they were really too large for us to consider trying to do it ourselves. So, in a way, he brought this down upon himself… (ha! no pun was actually intended)

:-j(enni)

PS: I’ve attached pictures of the serious damage as well as some photos from earlier showing how things looked before.

Plum Tree

Before:

Dec 17, 2008 – Nathan building a snow fort the first day it snowed this year.

After:

Back Door Shelter

Before:

Dec 20, 2008: Attempted photo of birds visiting our back yard for the birdseed we put out

After:

“Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.” – Maya Angelou

In a metaphorical sense, I’m glad I have snowshoes today.  We already had about 15 cm (6” for my American friends) of snow from the first dump last Monday and then it started snowing again about 11:30pm last night (Dec 23) and hasn’t stopped since.  I just went and checked our driveway, which Ron had cleared to the pavement yesterday afternoon, and there’s been 20 cm (8”) since last night.  I’ve heard on the news there could be as much as 30 cm (1’) by midnight tonight.

A White Christmas used to be so rare around here – I remember being particularly disappointed a couple of times when it would snow on the 23rd or early on the 24th but then it would rain, or get a lot warmer and everything would have melted away by the afternoon.  The snow, when we did get it, usually came in late January, early February, and occasionally as late as mid-March. That’s definitely changed – I’ve noticed we’ve had the white stuff on the ground at this time of year a lot more over the past five to eight years.

The weather people are predicting rain by Friday with highs of 8C (46.5F) over the weekend, so I expect everything to start melting and the “flood gates” to open up.  In which case, we’ll all be wishing we had a canoe (it’ll be too cold for a bikini) instead of these snowshoes.

:-j(enni)

My Introduction to SQL Server 2005 text book never ceases to disappoint.

I'm currently reading a chapter dedicated to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Microsoft's proprietary procedural programming extension to the SQL database language. The content for this chapter must be new material (i.e., not based on a topic found in the ORACLE version of the text book) and so, one might think, it would have been more closely reviewed during the edit cycle...

But no. No, there are several fun and exciting new errors in this chapter too.

While I haven't run into any ORCALE syntax yet, so far they've misspelled one T-SQL keyword two different ways, have repeated the information describing the syntax and use of another keyword in two different subsections and have mixed up the keyword information between two related statements.

I have extremely low expectations for the two remaining chapters I will be covering in this text.

:-j(enni)

Yep.  Part Seven.  Really.  With two subsections even!

part 7a: Data Disk? What Data Disk?

So, in my last post about textbook related problems I talked about how the textbook for my SQL 2005 Database courses was missing the x86 version of the software it was supposed to come with.  And told you I had solved that problem by downloading the 180-day Trial from of the Microsoft web site.

Well, that was a Friday and, as I'd spent two days studying for my "Data Exchange" challenge exam, I wanted to catch up on them by doing work over the weekend so I sat down on Saturday, installed the trial, and started working my way through the first chapter of the text book. Only a few pages in I stumble upon the first of many references to a "Student Data Disk".

"WTF...!?"

It turns out that there is supposed to be a second CD included with the text. It contains a bunch of SQL script files, divided into folders - one for each chapter - that are required to run through the examples in each chapter and to complete the "hands on exercises" at the end of each chapter.  And I don't have it.

So I go online and check out the publisher's web page for the text, and search on the author's names (James Perry and Gerald Post), and even search on the names of the first data file (Ch01Explore.sql), looking for somewhere to download this data from.  Somewhere along my, ultimately futile, search, I do discover that there is also supposed to be a "Companion Web Site" for the book containing resources for students and instructors. However, can I find the URL for this site anywhere? Nope. There's nothing in or with the text (as an aside, the text book for my Access Database course cleverly included companion web site information by providing it on a piece of paper inserted into a CD sleeve glued inside the back cover of the book), and I can't find anything more specific than the fact that such a site is supposed to exist somewhere online. 

I did, oddly enough, manage to track down the first script by name and the contents of the file I found actually did what the text of the Chapter was expecting it to do. It was particularly odd because the file I found was attached to information about the ORACLE Database Server... however, as later discoveries I discuss in part 7.2 will show, this was perhaps not as odd as it initially appears.

Despite finding this one file, I was so frustrated by the entire situation that I couldn't force myself to keep looking for additional files nor could I face reading through the text just to take notes, so I was, in the end, unable to catch up on the two days as I was hoping to.

When I got back to school on Monday, I brought this rather problematic issue to the instructor.  Luckily for me, he had saved copies of all the data files for the text on the school network folder for the course. There was also a file there that contained the URL to the companion web site (although, once I loaded it all it contained for students were copies of the data files I now had).

So, at this point I figure I can finally start learning something about Database Architecture and SQL Server 2005.

Hi-ho, back to reading and note taking I go...

Aside

To add an interesting side note to this data near-disaster, I eventually discovered that one of the data files that I received from the instructor contained the wrong content. I figured this out when I ran into significant problems trying to complete the first hands-on exercise at the end of chapter 3. Having brought the situation to the instructor's attention, we compared the script file I had to the "instructor copy" (vs. the "student copy") of the file where it was easy to see that the content in my file was completely different from the content in his file.

What it looked like was that someone had copied the script for the second exercise, made some changes within it that introduced syntax errors and then saved this modified script over the script for the first exercise. Thinking that the copy of the file on the school network might have been overwritten by a student - accidentally or otherwise - I downloaded a fresh copy from the companion web site but, no, the new file was incorrect in exactly the same way.

Kind of bizarre, actually. But really, what about all this isn't bizarre?

part 7b: Egregiously Erroneous Zone

The first chapter of the text is pretty straight forward - it's mainly an introduction to and steps for installing the software.  By the second chapter the text starts to get into specific examples and I have the scripts I need to follow along. So far so good.

It's in the end-of-chapter exercise section of chapter 2 that I first notice a small error - there's a relatively small typo in the script that students are directed to type into a SQL script. When writing SQL statements character text strings are always delimited with single quotes (apostrophes) on either side. If the string itself contains an apostrophe you identify this by typing two apostrophes one after the other where it occurs in the string.  If you don't do this, the parser assumes that the character string ends when it hits the lone apostrophe in the middle of the string and then reports a syntax error when it encounters the rest of the string.  In this case, the script neglected to double-up the single apostrophe in the word don't - that is, the script showed 'don't' and not 'don''t'.

As it happens, the paragraph immediately preceding the script sample explicitly mentions this fact about apostrophes in character strings and ends by reminding the student not to forget to double up on apostrophes in this situation. Rather ironic typo, really, but nothing to be too worried about, right?

I continue with my studying and eventually move on to the third chapter.  In the section on making and modifying CONSTRAINTS (rules that determine what data can and can not be included in a row of a database table) I encounter something that is rather confusing - the discussion about the ALTER TABLE command mentions the keyword MODIFY, claiming it is used to make changes to the definition of individual table columns, however the sample syntax in the same area of the discussion shows this being done via the keywords ALTER COLUMN...

I do a test and confirm that the ALTER COLUMN syntax works while the MODIFY syntax does not.

I confer with my instructor.  He looks over the text for a bit, and then says that he thinks that MODIFY is the keyword used in ORACLE's implementation of SQL.

"WTF...?"

He does a bit of research online and concludes that, yes, the "incorrect" syntax is correct if used against an ORACLE server. He surmises that the text may have been originally an ORACLE textbook that has been "massaged" to work with SQL Server 2005.

Mentally I groan and think, "Surely, no good can come of this...."

Now I'm actually a little worried about the final exam for the course. What if I'm asked questions that have been crafted based on the erroneous information in the text book?  I don't really want to remember this stuff that is actually incorrect, but if I don't then I might get asked something based on it and I won't be able to answer correctly. The instructor assures me that he will review my test manually (all the exams are computer administered multiple choice things) and we can challenge anything that falls into this category if it occurs. (Aside: This actually does occur once on the exam, but I did remember what the incorrect details were in the text, so I got that answer correct)

Moving along I find a few more typographical errors in scripts students are asked to type in to complete the end-of-chapter exercises for Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 I encounter some more orphaned ORACLE keywords in the descriptive text as well as some more typos in step-by-step script text. I also start to find some plain old bad editing - grammar problems, situations where one sentence makes a statement and then a later sentence says something that contradicts the first statement.

And then, the pièce de résistance: A Chapter 4 end-of-chapter multiple choice review question where NONE of the answers are correct because of what amounts to a copy and paste error.

All together now... "WTF...!?"

Good God!

Did no one at Prentice-Hall actually copyedit this book?

Did either of the authors - both PhD's at Universities in the US, both with lengthy curriculum vitae that suggest they know what they are talking about when it comes to database architecture - bother to review their "massaged" book before it shipped?

Was there no one reviewing the book who went through the text and the examples and the exercises step-by-step to make sure that what the text said matched what the scripts did and that the scripts were valid?

I just thank my lucky stars that I'm a highly intelligent individual with a prior background in software development.  If I was someone who was trying to start from scratch all these problems and errors would just eat away at my morale until I was ready to give up altogether.

If I was either of the authors I would be embarrassed to have my name associated with this textbook. I'm seriously considering sending them an email letting them know just exactly what their so-called Introduction to SQL Server 2005 is really like.

As for the publisher - Prentice Hall should hang their head in shame! How could they ship such an awful product to instructors and students and feel justified asking more than $100 for it?

{fume}

That's So Jenni...

The number of errors in the text continues to grow and, me being who I am, I've started tracking all the errors I've encountered in a file which I started after I learned the instructor had sent email to the publisher looking for an official errata sheet only to find they don't seem to have one and because I knew there are other students who will soon be taking this same course in the near future who would benefit from the information.

Apparently, the publisher has subsequently asked the instructor if he would "share his discoveries with them." His initial response was that he couldn't because the work was not his but a student's. I've since told him that it's okay for him to share my notes with the publisher - I mean, yes, I shouldn't have to do this at all as it was a job they should have done before the book shipped, but, really, why make them re-invent the wheel when I've done the work already? Doing that would just be petty and, if there is one thing I'm not prone to, it's pettiness.

Just for the sake of posterity, I include a link to a copy of the file with my notes (it's in RTF format). As of today it covers all of chapters 1 through 6 except for the chapter 6 end-of-chapter exercises as I haven't completed them yet.

:-jenni

I wanted to put something up about school that has a more positive spin to it, so I thought I'd share my marks so far:

 
And, if I keep this up (that is, if I maintain a 90%+ in academics) I'm told I could graduate with honours.

Go me!

:-j(enni)