[vlaaad]

Use the term, never define the term, classic.

CTE stands for Common Table Expressions in SQL. They are temporary result sets defined within a single query using the WITH clause, acting like named subqueries to improve readability and structure.

[radimm]

OP here, damn - that's a very good point. Can't believe I missed it.

[iainmerrick]

From the headline, I thought it might be about sports-related concussions!

I was morbidly curious what a "good CTE" could possibly be...

[QuantumNomad_]

As someone who is not much of a sports person, now I was wondering what CTE means in sports.

Seems to be this:

> Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease […]

> Evidence indicates that repetitive concussive and subconcussive blows to the head cause CTE. In particular, it is associated with contact sports such as boxing, American football, Australian rules football, wrestling, mixed martial arts, ice hockey, rugby, and association football.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...

[alistairSH]

Yep, that's it.

The NFL in the US has famously gone to great lengths to downplay the impact of CTE on current and retired players. And there have been several famous players who literally lost their minds as they aged, and we now know that was due to CTE. Something like 90% of ex-NFLers have it. The number is still really bad for collegiate players. And even high school players are at risk.

It was to the point that Will Smith starred in a movie about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussion_(2015_film)

[theturtletalks]

I’ve been playing Madden for years and they literally fazed out concussions in the game in their attempt to downplay the risks.

[iainmerrick]

Yeah - Muhammad Ali is the most famous victim (or at least likely victim, I don’t think he was officially diagnosed with CTE as it wasn’t well understood back then). In the UK, it’s gradually becoming recognised as a serious problem in rugby.

I assumed the C stood for Concussion. Wrong but also partly right!

[tialaramex]

I was thinking "Compile Time Execution" like Rust's const, C++ consteval functions, Zig's comptime, that sort of thing. So the good/ bad made more sense but I was still on the wrong track, yeah a definition was appropriate.

[DANmode]

That’s what got me to click!

[swasheck]

i appreciate the way you took the feedback. i saw the domain name and immediately knew the content and context. the article did not disappoint. i come from a heavy mssql background with some postgres sprinkled in, but my current company is migrating our mssql fleet to pg and it’s nice to have a technical foundation and article to be able to truly understand and pass the differences and similarities then how the two platforms handle workload. Traditionally it’s just been multiple sides, mercilessly criticizing each other for their deficiencies, but each platform has its own strengths and its own gaps. I’m excited to be a part of this migration, and I appreciate technical articles such as this that help me articulate the broader challenges to both our executive level levels, and our developers.

edit: syntax. voice to text was liberal with the comma abuse

[xxs]

I read the article before the abbreviate definition inclusion as its very opening. I had never met the abbreviation before.

It'd be quite surprising the WITH statement in top a query to be the first feature to learn/use past basic SQL. Is it personal experience in some industry?

[mcdonje]

While generally a fair critique, the site does have "SQL" in its name.

[tclancy]

Agreed. I was relieved to see this wasn’t written by Cam Skatteboro.

[lizknope]

Yeah, I thought I was on a sports site. Cam thinks CTE isn't real and is "all in your head." Technically correct about the all in your head part.

[da_chicken]

Eh, almost every link on the homepage has an initialism or acronym in the title, and roughly none of them are actually defining the term they're using. Indeed, not to point fingers, your own submissions make the same mistake.

Sure, yes, OP should (and now has) defined the term. But at the same time it's reasonable to expect that someone reading a blog post on BoringSQL.com would already know the term just as much as we could expect people interested in Clojure would know what a REPL is.

[cpfohl]

Your comment could have been more helpful without the first sentence. SAME content, same correction, less superiority: "CTE is an overloaded term, in this article ......"

This is a valuable comment, don't ruin it with sarcasm and rudeness.

[NooneAtAll3]

> Your comment could have been more helpful without the first sentence.

no it wouldn't

the whole point is to critique the post

[cpfohl]

You can critique without being sarcastic:

> Use the term, never define the term, classic.

Communicate the same thing in a way you'd do to someone's face:

> This article doesn't define the term "CTE".

Or even more directly, still not rude:

> I wish the article had defined its terms! "CTE" stands for "Common Table Expressions..."