The song What might be the song for the meme, Particle Man, in case anyone was interested… courtesy of the Animaniacs and They Might Be Giants.

Used an Excel spreadsheet? You’re now a data analyst. Dabbled in Access? Congratulations, you’re now an experienced database administrator.

I feel personally attacked and simultaneously validated by your analysis.

Have you ever spent the night atop Cader Idris?

And if so, were the results madness or poetry?

I LAY on that rock where the storms have their dwelling,

The birthplace of phantoms, the home of the oloud;

Around it for ever deep music is swelling,

The voice of the mountain-wind, solemn and loud.

‘Twas a midnight of shadows all fitfully streaming,

Of wild waves and breezes, that mingled their moan;

Of dim shrouded stars, as from gulfs faintly gleaming;

And I met the dread gloom of its grandeur alone.

I lay there in silence–a spirit came o’er me;

Man’s tongue hath no language to speak what I saw:

Things glorious, unearthly, pass’d floating before me,

And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.

I view’d the dread beings around us that hover,

Though veil’d by the mists of mortality’s breath;

And I call’d upon darkness the vision to cover,

For a strife was within me of madness and death.

I saw them–the powers of the wind and the ocean,

The rush of whose pinion bears onward the storms;

Like the sweep of the white-rolling wave was their motion,

I felt their dim presence,–but knew not their forms !

I saw them–the mighty of ages departed–

The dead were around me that night on the hill:

From their eyes, as they pass’d, a cold radiance they darted,–

There was light on my soul, but my heart’s blood was chill.

I saw what man looks on, and dies–but my spirit

Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;

And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit

A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power !

Day burst on that rock with the purple cloud crested,

And high Cader Idris rejoiced in the sun;–

But O ! what new glory all nature invested,

When the sense which gives soul to her beauty was won!

- “The Rock of Cader Idris” by Felicia Hemans

At first I was like:

…then I saw this:

And began to realize that things were about to get bad…

I didn’t realize the drama, the pathos:

The good times:

…and the bad:

After much contemplation, I realized there was only one meme I could post in defense:

Lotta smarter people than me have already posted better answers in this thread, but this really stood out to me:

the thing is. my queries are not that complex. they simply go through the whole table to identify any duplicates which are not further processed then, because the processing takes time (which we thought would be the bottleneck). but the time savings to not process duplicates seems now probably less than that it takes to compare batches with the SQL table

Why aren’t you de-duping the table before processing? What’s inserting these duplicates and why are they necessary to the table? If they serve no purpose, find out what’s generating them and stop it, or write a pre-load script to clean it up before your core processing queries access that table. I’d start here - it sounds like what’s really happening is that you’ve got a garbage query dumping dupes into your table and bloating your db.

“Suck who? I’m gonna do what you tell me.”

Trump.

Edit: QuarterSwede beat me to it, so I’ll go for Musk as a close second.

Guys…

This is almost exactly what happened to me on Monday, resulting in a fifteen hour day.

My particular jenga piece was an Access query that none of my predecessors had deigned to document or even tell me about… but was critical to run monthly or you had obsolete data embedded deep within multi-million dollar reports.

Thank god I don’t work on salary anymore, or I’d be really upset.

Welcome to the dark side, young padawan…

cackles manically in DAX

It’s not really a fatal flaw as other users have pointed out.

The ATP protocol could be improved by including a published “delete” request for the content ID of an item, so that the receiving instance would get notification that the item had been removed. This could then be automated to push a delete action on the receiving instance, or manually removed by the receiving instance admin.

Regardless, however, you’d have to trust that the “delete” tag was being respected by your federating instances.

However, one interesting element is that editing your content is actually more effective in the Fediverse than deleting it, as it will overwrite the content on remote servers when they re-query your instance. You’re still relying on that remote action before the old content changes, but at least it doesn’t just stay up while the content is deleted on your site.

You will understand in time, young padawan…

It depends on how long you use it:

Year 1: Ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?

Year 2: How is it still fucking breaking?

Year 3: I just don’t fucking care why it keeps breaking. I think I hate this program.

Year 4: I hate this program

Year 5: Let the hate flow through you, consume you. Feel the dark side flowing through your fingertips. Yes. Good. Why is it breaking? It’s the end users. Yes… they’ve been plotting against you from the beginning - hiding columns, erasing formulas and even…

merging cells

Que heavy breathing through a respirator.

Year 6: It’s a board meeting. They ask you if you can average all the moving averages of average sales per month and provide an exponential trendline to forecast growth on five million rows of data.

You say “sure, boss, I can knock that for you in Excel in about an hour or two.”

Your team leader interjects “I believe what he was trying to say was we’ll use Tableau and it will take about a month.”

You turn to him with a steely glare.

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

Year 7: Your team leader is gone after you pointed out he fucked up one of your sheets that run the business by merging a cell. All data flows through you and the holy spreadsheet, and the board is terrified of firing you because no one knows how your sheets work but you and their entire inventory system would collapse if you leave.

But then the inevitable happens. Dissension in the ranks. The juniors talk of python, R, Tableau, Power BI - anything to release your dark hold upon the holy data. You could crush them all with a xlookup chain faster than they can type a SELECT statement. The Rebellion is coming, but you’re ready. You’ve discovered the Data Model, capable of building a relational database behind the hidden moons of Power Pivot, parsing tens of millions of rows - and your Death Star is almost complete.

You’re ready to unleash your dark fury when the fucking spreadsheet breaks again.

Year 8: New company. They ask if you know Excel. You just start cackling with a addictive gleam in your eye as tears start streaming down your face.

They hire you on the spot.

All they use is Excel. And Access.

You think, ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?

Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.

Depends…

Agreed - actually came here to say this. The Saudis have been pretty blatant in how they time their pricing manipulation to American politics and economic trends. Like how oil prices stayed high even after COVID killed demand while Biden was in office, or how they flooded the market to try and kill the American fracking industry after Trump was elected the first time.

I don’t think that’s the problem. This new 20.25 patch is filled with Russian malware and is failing to integrate with our legacy free market democratic systems. I suggest we roll back to version 20.21 until they manage to provide a functional upgrade.

Post Traumatic Shit Disorder, to be precise.