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.

Haven’t done it myself yet, but here’s the docker install guide… seeing what your username is and all…

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.

I play mages, so the real issue for me is that the magic system in Oblivion is far superior. Being able to craft your own spells is absolutely fantastic. Skyrim cheaped out by removing the complexity and spell crafting, and Shouts didn’t really serve as a decent replacement.

Combat with the remaster is exceptionally smooth and natural, and I honestly preferred the original Oblivion system than Skyrim’s - which always felt janky to me - like it was trying to use Fallout mechanics to show off, not because it made for a better combat experience.

The questing and storyline strikes an excellent balance between open world discovery and directed play - Skyrim’s felt disconnected, and I often lost track of exactly what was going on or why. You also get far more background and story - books in Skyrim are usually one or two pages long. Books in Oblivion usually are around 20 - 30 pages.

The remaster absolutely kicks ass - visually, it’s easily on par with Skyrim graphics, and the audio is fantastic. The performance is far better as well, but it still retains a lot of the old school flavor with the simple interface. I’m really enjoying it thus far - it’s been long enough since i played the original on the 360 that it’s like a new game.

Plus, it’s got some amazing early 00’s voice talent - Patrick Stewart plays the Emperor, and despite the lines being a bit janky at time due to how they were recorded, the actors did a really good job.

All in all, it’s AAA title from a time when that meant something, and with the modern engine and graphics, it’s a masterpiece that outshines many of the top titles out today.

Better than Skyrim. Fight me.

Trump.

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

Rock out with your Spock out

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

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?

I went to Coachella twenty years ago. It was more than enough.

Worst part was Perry Farrel… guy was already past his prime then, and his attempts to hit the high notes on old Jane’s Addiction tracks sounded like a mangy alley cat in heat. He kinda looked like one too.

That plus the shitty fairground venue with 110 degree heat stuck up in the asscrack of nowhere made it rank pretty much as the worst concert I had ever been too.

There are so many good venues in SoCal you can spend your $ at - Coachella ain’t one of them.

Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.

The origin of the throwing glaive, which ended up influencing game designers for decades to come….

Pretty impressive for a weapon that would, in real life, sever all your fingers upon first use.

Depends…

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.