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The Dot is closed. Long live KDE Planet!
As KDE grows, so does the interest in each of its projects. Gathering all KDE news in one place no longer works. The volume of updates coming from the KDE community as a whole has become too large to cover in its entirety on the Dot. With this in mind, we are archiving the Dot, but keeping its content accessible for historical reasons.
The news coming out of the community was curated and edited for the Dot. The current rate of news items being published today would've not only made that impractical, but would have also led to things being unjustly left out, giving only a partial view of what was going on.
But we are not leaving you without your source of KDE news! We have figured out something better: we have worked with KDE webmasters to set up a blogging system for contributors. You can now access Announcements, Akademy, the Association news, and the news from your favorite projects directly, unfiltered, unedited, straight from the source.
Or... If you want to keep up with what is going on in ALL KDE projects and news on a daily (often hourly) basis, use the Planet! Access it on the web or add an RSS feed to your reader. You can also follow KDE news as it happens in our Discuss forums and talk about it live with the rest of the community. You can even follow @planet.kde.org@rss-parrot.net on Mastodon to stay up to date.
If you just want the highlights, check out our social media:
X-Rays From a Nuclear Explosion Could Redirect an Asteroid
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Space for Queries
Maria was hired as a consultant by a large financial institution. The institution had a large pile of ETL scripts, reports, analytics dashboards, and the like, which needed to be supported. The challenge is that everyone who wasn't a developer had built the system. Due to the vagaries of internal billing, hiring IT staff to do the work would have put it under a charge code which would have drained the wrong budget, so they just did their best.
The quality of the system wasn't particularly good, and it required a lot of manual support to actually ensure that it kept working. It was several hundred tables, with no referential integrity constraints on them, no validation rules, no concept of normalization (or de-normalization- it was strictly abnormalied tables) and mostly stringly typed data. It all sat in an MS SQL Server, and required daily manual runs of stored procedures to actually function.
Maria spent a lot of time exploring the data, trying to understand the various scripts, stored procedures, manual processes, and just the layout of the data. As part of this, she ran SELECT queries directly from the SQL Server Management Studio (SMSS), based on the various ETL and reporting jobs.
One reporting step queried the "BusinessValue" column from a table. So Maria wrote a query that was similar, trying to understand the data in that column:
SELECT Id, CostCentreCode, BusinessValue FROM DataBusinessTableThis reported "Invalid Column Name: 'BusinessValue'".
Maria re-read the query she was copying. She opened the definition of the table in the SMSS UI. There was a column clearly labeled "BusinessValue". She read it carefully, ensuring that there wasn't a typo or spelling error, either in her query or the table definition.
After far too much time debugging, she had the SMSS tool generate the CREATE TABLE statement to construct the table.
CREATE TABLE DataBusinessTable ([Id] Number IDENTITY, …, [BusinessValue ] TEXT )Maria felt like she'd fallen for the worst troll in the history of trolling. The column name had a space at the end.
According to Maria, this has since been "fixed" in SQL Server- you can now run queries which omit trailing whitespace from names, but at the time she was working on this project, that's clearly not how things worked.
The fact that this trailing whitespace problem was common enough that the database engine added a feature to avoid it is in fact, the real WTF.
[Advertisement] Otter - Provision your servers automatically without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Get started today!Car Software Patches Are Over 20% of Recalls, Study Finds
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ByteDance Is Shutting Down TikTok Music Globally
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Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won't Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030
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Kansas Water Facility Switches to Manual Operations Following Cyberattack
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James Cameron Joins Board of Stability AI In Coup For Tech Firm
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Human Reviewers Can't Keep Up With Police Bodycam Videos. AI Now Gets the Job
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Caroline Ellison Sentenced To Two Years In Jail For Role In FTX Fraud, Must Forfeit $11 Billion
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California Governor Vetoes Bill Requiring Opt-Out Signals For Sale of User Data
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OpenAI Finally Brings Humanlike ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode To US Plus, Team Users
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CrowdStrike Overhauls Testing and Rollout Procedures To Avoid System Crashes
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Online Discounts Are Getting Stingier
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Electronic Warfare Spooks Airlines, Pilots and Air-Safety Officials
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DOJ Sues Visa For Locking Out Rival Payment Platforms
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World's Biggest Banks Pledge Support For Nuclear Power
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The Quest To Build a Telescope On the Moon
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Low-Lying Pacific Islands Pin Hopes on UN Meeting as Sea Rise Threatens Survival
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Trump Hack Continued Into Last Week
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