Joins

There are only three join mechanisms used by Oracle: merge join, hash join and nested loop join.

Here’s an important thought: all three join methods are nested loop joins with different startup costs.

Discuss.

And while I’m asking questions: what’s the perfect tense of the verb “troubleshoot”, as in :

• I am trouble-shooting a problem
• I was trouble-shooting a problem
• … ?

Update 9th Aug: By a fairly convincing lead English grammar comes out as more interesting than Oracle technologies – so I’ll write up joins in my next note (or three). In the meantime, we have a new question to ask about trouble-shooting, inspired by Bix (note 11): is the verb transitive or intransitive, viz: do we simply trouble-shoot, or do we trouble-shoot an object ?

Linguistic constructs tend to go through three phases, of course: (1) nobody says that, (2) nobody with a decent education would say that, (3) everybody says it expect for a couple of old fogies. I reserve the right, therefore, to be opinionated and wrong about the use of the verb “trouble-shooting”.

Opinion 1: the verb is intranstive – you do not troubleshoot a problem, although you may do trouble-shooting on a system.

Opinion 2: there is no past participle (despite Nigel’s perfectly reasonable suggestion (note 1) of “trouble-shot”) for trouble-shooting.  Consequently the only past tenses for trouble-shooting are:

• past progressive – I was troubleshooting
• present perfect progressive – I have been trouble-shooting
• past perfect progressive – I had been trouble-shooting

Trouble-shooting is a “continuous” action, even when it takes (took) place in the past, so has no “simple past” tenses.  (Alternatively, you can compare troubleshooting with those extreme irregular Latin verbs whose past participle looks nothing like their present participle, hence the simple past for “I am troubleshooting” is “I have (not) fixed it”.)

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

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