I used to leave my name, personal cell # and an apology at the top of any of my dynamic SQL queries. I know what its going to be like, man, I wrote that shit. I'm so sorry.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Bold move.. Hopefully you're not getting calls in 10 years when stuff breaks and you're at a different company
(Public sector, if this stuff goes down people don't get their heart meds so I don't overly mind the stale followup calls. Tho I'll be shocked if any of that code is still in use, most of it was being obsoleted even back when I still worked there)
Plus then you can bill as an independent contractor.
I wish I was working on your stuff back when I supported stinky 2008 T-SQL where everything was dynamic and sequential. I would have called you just for moral support
Comon over to Tsql 2022! Nothing has changed, except the AI is writing the dynamic SQL now so you don't have to! It's going great!
Just to be clear, I think T-SQL is fine and apparently they added some string agg function so you don't have to hack XML_agg so... Something improved. But stinky spaghetti SQL is unfixable
dynamic SQL. I remember those days. I once got criticized by colleagues for "breaking" a dynamic SQL search query - you know the one - because I realized that it wasn't building most of the query. I have no idea how it worked, but I made it put out actually valid SQL and it took forever. I forget if we rolled that back. We were using MS TFS, so probably not haha
I’ve written those same comments so many times over the years.
We all pretend our code doesn’t stink, but show me a developer who’s never left a a turd in a codebase, and I’ll show you someone who’s never been under a deadline.
##############################
# ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE BE WARNED
# THIS ISN'T MY FAULT, BUT $TOOL ONLY
# ALLOWS THIS DIRTY WORKAROUND
#
# DO NOT CHANGE OR REFACTOR
# ANYTHING.
#
# IF YOU NEED TO TOUCH THIS CODE
# INCREMENT THIS COUNTER AS A
# WARNING FOR THE NEXT POOR FUCK
#
# TOTAL HOURS WASTED DEBUGGING
# 15
# TOTAL HOURS WASTED REFACTORING
# 8
# SUCCESSFUL CHANGES
# 0
##############################
Oh god this turned into a vent session
I think back of what I left behind. And I feel bad.
But then I feel better because I remember the reason I left was that we outgrew our processes and codebase and we desperately needed a restructure but i got no support in doing so.
I bitched for years that it was a continuity risk and a performance nightmare. But no. "Deliver more features. Add more junk for use cases that brought us no business value." Never consider governance or security. Never consider best practices. Just more.
I knew eventually something bad would happen and I would be thrown under the bus. So I split. It was a good decision.
But yeah. Seone inherited a lot turd code
We all pretend our code doesn’t stink
For myself... Maybe for 5 solid minutes lol
Too many companies living aboard the sunk-cost ship. Burn that trash to the ground.
General life advice: sometimes its more cost-effective to start over from scratch