As my 25th winter in Chicago approaches (and after the 2016 elections),, I attempt to cheer myself up with jokes. Programmer jokes. Jokes that largely have to do with being too lazy to verify assumptions or prove claims before making decisions that turn out to be really bad decision. Here's the most recent "joke" I heard from a developer, via an email back in July: We just encountered a PL/SQL performance problem after migrating a database from 10g to 11g and I tought it might interest you. I isolated the problem using the 10046 traces and DBMS_PROFILER. So I was able to reproduce the problem with a very simple PL/SQL testcase, but I cannot explain it. He then pasted in 439 lines of code and output. So this is the "very simple" testcase? It might be, but still I wrote back: "It may be simple, but it's long and I'd appreciate it if you would summarize for me what you believe you have discovered." This way, at least, I ...
For the last twenty years, I have managed to transform an obsession with PL/SQL into a paying job. How cool is that?