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Comment by Roboprog | Hacker News Reader

So show your coworkers how to run the query-plan dumper for your DB brand. The curtain is torn away, and the underlying ISAM is revealed for all to see to allow the needed "hints", indices or restructuring to be understood.

Don't lord it over them, explain.

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As my prior boss used to say... "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you'll have to answer fucking fish questions the rest of your life."

Second this - I've cooked up some weird SQL to do neat things.

Other devs on my team had real problems with it - they were stuck and found it really difficult to "think in sets." They kept asking me about how to use cursors to go through data . . . heck, they may even have been right from a clarity and maintenance perspective.

But the object-oriented part of my brain has apparently been excised by spending so much time fishing (SQL). So now I have too many fish questions in that direction.

You're assuming the other people want to learn. Generally, if people want to learn something, they ask questions. Telling co-workers how to do something when they don't ask can be... tricky. It depends on the environment you're in, your relationship with the people, and the people themselves.

Fair enough. You can lead an idiot to knowledge, but you can't make him think.

They were disinterested. Under normal conditions you are correct and most people would be interested but they were not.

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