Appropriate use of the 'query-help' tag

Question

Would you tag a question as query or query-help or both when asking for help debugging a query?

Example question here

Answer 1

I'm not sure either of these tags is a great idea, but I particularly dislike query-help because it's redundant. If your question is about a SQL Query, that's fine, and obviously you need help because otherwise why would you be posting about it here? for funsies?

So, ixnay on the -help isms.

The tag query seems a bit broad to me, as in, isn't there some other specific aspect of the query that you need help with? But I don't have strong feelings about that, and I suppose it could be useful to follow all the questions involving queries versus, say, database design.

Answer 2

I lean towards only using query-help since it's specifically requesting help with the query.

Answer 3

I agree with Jeff Atwood that all questions are requests for help, so the -help is redundant.

The query tag is useful because it at least narrows down the scope of the question. I agree that if more specific tags exist for the question then those should be employed as well, but if the question is about a query then it should still contain the query tag.

For example, a question about an analytic function in a query could contain both the query and the analytic-function tags. This would let us know that the help being requested concerns a query that contains an analytic-function. Dropping the query tag would prevent getting a list of all query related questions and dropping the analytic-function tag would decrease the specificity of the question.

Answer 4

Query-help is more appealing and to the point when you need help with query only. That means SQL related, nothing else involved.

Query is more helpful when you need help related with a number of issues that also includes a query. For example you are pulling data in Gridview in ASP.NET Application and you are not getting what you are expecting. The problem could be gridview, C# code or the query. Query is a good tag here.

They should not be used together. The thing that I like about query-help is it isolates everything from the problem. The OP can even use this tag to test their query first before posting their problem. SO I think query-help is useful. I do agree -help looks a bit awkward.