CW Sloth Award

Question… If someone has 1300 chaser points, and >1000 of them are CW, are they still eligible for the CW endorsement?

Yes, for chasers it’s straight forward.

For activator endorsements the checker code ensure you have activations that qualify on the endorsement you request.

i.e. if you ask for an activator award ALL 20m CW then only activations with 4 or more 20m CW QSOs are considered and the score calculated from them. This is different from the honour roll which will show activations where you had at least 1 20m CW QSO.

Thanks. A member of our club has a few VHF chases and was talking about deleting them from his SOTA account so that he could qualify for the all CW Sloth. I told him that I thought as long as he had 1000 CW points that the VHF wouldn’t matter. I know as an activator I’d appreciate him not deleting them. :slight_smile:

There is never any need to do that. We have plenty of SQL query concocting experience on the team that we can seek out the QSOs that matter :wink:

I knew the DB and DBAs had been honed into a well-oiled machine and figured that it could be sorted out without him resorting to this. :slight_smile:

The most important thing I have learned in the last 10 years of being involved with the DB for SOTA is this…

WRAP EVERY QUERY THAT CAN MAKE A CHANGE IN A TRANSACTION statement.

i.e.

BEGIN TRANSACTION

do_some_hoopy-frood_query_that_might_delete_everybody’s_logs

ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
COMMIT TRANSACTION

If I run that in the SQL console without thinking t marks the transaction, does the hoopy frood stuff and then immediately rolls it back any changes and errors on the commit (because it rolled it back). What I actually do is highlight each line and hit F5 in MS-SSMS to execute it. When the query has run I can look to see if the number of records changed matches the number I expect and then I can highlight the COMMIT line and write the change back to the DB or rollback and figure out what is wrong.

This means I can do fixes/changes for people on the live DB and not worry about screwing the pooch. For serious malarkey I run a local copy of the DB and play with that and when I’m happy I have a pre-tested query to run. But BEGIN/ROLLBACK has saved so many people’s logs it should get a reward :wink:

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Agreed. When I used to mess with Juniper network equipment I loved the fact that you could set it to automatically roll back configuration changes in case you made a config error that locked you out of the device! That saved my butt a few times.

Some years ago, we had the ability to see easily if there was a chaser’s entry that matched our activator’s entry. However, an AM in the US persisted in removing all of his activation claims that did not have a match, for any reason. Andy warned him multiple times to either stop or lose the ability to see a match. He didn’t stop, and the matching feature went away. The lesson - don’t fool with mother nature and don’t fool with the database administrator.

Elliott, K6EL
Sota MT

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TEN FOUR !