I woke up very early the day before the Memorial Day holiday. So I got some breakfast before work. Even with this detour I arrived at work by 6:30am. I was the first guy in the room. The problem with this is that I cannot open the door by myself. I always knock somebody else lets me in. But the day before I noticed that the lock on the door was sticking. So I took a chance and got lucky. The door remained ajar all night. My backup plan would have been to go to the cafeteria and sit around until somebody can and unlocked the door. I brought some work to do just in case that happened.When I got to work I continued to work on the latest task. Another developer took over the whole application I was porting to Visual Studio 2005 and the Oracle 10g client. So I was to help out another guy who was a VB programmer stuck trying to make sense of Visual C++. It turned out I would be doing all the work of getting the port of his application working. I knew I was in for trouble when the app would not even come up. Apparently the developer converted the string functions to use the new secure CRT versions. But almost all of them used the wrong parameters causing the app to abort on start up. So I hunted down all those bugs and at least got the application to start up and log into the database.
Every time this application that I inherited tried to do anything with the database, I got an Oracle error. It seemed like something very fundamental was wrong. I searched through the configuration of each of the projects. There were some settings that had not been ported from the old Oracle 8i client configuration. But this was not the main problem. So I tried swapping out modules and reporting the old code to see if that would help. No luck. The application was still bombing on every database call. Not of the help online pointed me to anything wrong in particular with the code. So I went back to the old version of the code. It worked fine. I spent a couple hours reporting the code to the Oracle 10g client and Visual Studio 2005. Still no luck. It might be time to look harder at the module in the app that handle the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) details. But I am really at a loss to debug this darn thing.
During the day I was so depressed that I switched to another low priority task. I modified some application code to call a new Report Scheduler instead of the normal Oracle Reports Server. Turns out the developer who wrote the scheduler gave me some seriously buggy code. It was always throwing an error. The guy was not in. So I emailed him telling him his unit tests must not have been too thorough.
The funny thing about the day was that, while I was encountering all these problems, the girl next to me spent the entire day talking on the phone. LOL. Good thing she has a quiet voice. I don't think she is happy with her current assignment. She is a DBA by training. But they are having her do some Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) work which she hates. I am not sure if there is anyone happy on our team. This is a bad sign. We shall see where this takes us.
