Messing up a live demo, opps

Yesterday I had presented a webinar on using Machine Learning and Time Series in RavenDB. One of the things that I love about doing those webinars is that I get to field questions from the audience and have to really think on my feet.

In almost all cases, I think that I am able to provide good answers, and I usually accompany these with a live demo showing what is going on.

Yesterday, that wasn’t the case. During the demo, I managed to run into a fairly obscure bug very deep in the internals of RavenDB and got the wrong results. Then I got stuck on that and couldn’t figure out what is a proper workaround until just after the webinar concluded.

Hugely embarrassing, but at least I can take comfort that it wasn’t the first time that a live demo failed and probably won’t be the last time.

The good news, on the other hand, is that I created an issue to fix this problem. Today I made myself a cup of coffee and was about to dig into the problem when I realized that it has already been fixed. Time from opening the bug to it getting fixed, under 6 hours. That is without rushing it, mind you. I think that given the turnaround time, it is a good thing overall that I run into this.

The actual problem, for what it is worth, is that we had lazily evaluated a collection during its enumeration. However, when using GroupBy(), we effectively enumerated the value twice, fetching different values each time. The second time, we would use the last value from the collection, since it was lazily evaluated. You can check the pull request if you are that much of a nerd .