Humor

As part of an experiment, I needed to build a really long query. (Don’t ask.) From another recent experiment, I know that SQL Server won’t let a query return more than 65,535 columns. I set about writing a one-line query that would return 65,535. I’m a big fan of writing the simplest reproduction scripts possible –…

Somewhat different than a sex bomb, a fork bomb is a denial-of-service attack that just starts a process that replicates itself, thereby starting more and more processes until the service goes down. Wikipedia’s fork bomb page lists examples on most operating systems (including Windows). I’ve always found fork bombs funny because of their elegant simplicity, so…

Every now and then, we put on our bad idea jeans in the company chat room and come up with something really ill-advised. We should probably bury these in the back yard, but…what fun would that be? Bad ideas are the most fun when they’re shared. One day, after seeing enough horrific but well-meaning indexes created…

Say you’re at Dell DBA Days, and you want to build a really ugly query, fast. You want to generate a StackOverflow database query that will take a long time to compile, and maybe demand a huge amount of memory to run, but not actually take any time to execute. You might start by building…