My favourite sort faux pas
Many, many years ago I had to assist a colleague who had a sort problem. This is in the early days of relational databases on a computer with relatively limited capability. Unfortunately I can't remember all the details (it was about 30 years ago) but he essentially retrieved each record from the database searched for individually to avoid sorting and taking into account the database performance and his program's internal algorithms the execution was order N^4. He requested my assistance because his program worked fine when tested on a 10 record example (although he really should have twigged that taking 2 seconds was rather too long) but when tested on real world data (only 120 records) it just "looped". He did go an fix it when I pointed out that based on his algorithms expected completion time was about 12 hours and it was working just fine. I wish I could remember all the details.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
