Softare Upgrade Rumble

We use some software from the same vendor for issue tracking and source code control. The customer has declared that we will be upgrading to a new version of both of these clients. From past experience, I expected this to take about a week to happen.


After given the green light, I tried to download the update. Too many people were doing that. So I got put into a queue. I was number 14, and then 13, then 12. This lasted all afternoon and evening. My position in line got updated once a minute.


Then midnight struck. The updates every minute stopped. Apparently the queue could not handle the transition at midnight to the next day. It got confused and thought instead of an update in 1 minute, it would give me an update 21 hours later. Nope.


I killed my download and started again. This time it work. By the next morning, the software packages had downloaded. They asked me if I agreed to uninstall the old versions. I concurred. Then a reboot was required.


I checked my software. Old versions were gone. Next versions nowhere to be seen. I dialed into a huge conference for help. They were of no help. Some other guy on my project noticed my problems and told me to start again from the beginning.


Well I knew to wait until after midnight to start up the download. This time it went by faster. The software got installed. But when I tried to run it and access some code, it complained that it could not connect to the license manager. I will stop here. There was a lot more pain. Basically a fail. And I hear they want to switch to some other software later this year.

Good-fast-cheap. Pick two.

I got invited to a meeting with the customer today. There was a problem in production. And the customer wanted answers. When it came time, I explained what was going on. Our new system used the same data source as the old one. But we were not doing the exact same transform of data. Therefore they saw different values in the reporting system.

I said we could fix this by updating the function that loads the data. We could apply this transform there. We could also write a script to correct all the wrong data loaded so far. Should close the case. The customer understood that. But then they asked if we could be proactive and prevent this type of problems.

Immediately I saw through the request. I said we could take the action to find out other times when the old system does a transform, and make sure we have those transforms present. However no, I could not do anything to make sure everything was being done 100% correctly. This is a huge system with non-trivial software involved. There are bugs in there.

Essentially I responded that no I could not do anything to make the reporting results 100% correct. It is just not feasible. This is an application of the good/fast/cheap management trifecta. They only get to pick 2 of those. The third one will suffer. In our scenario, the schedule is fixed, and the cost is fixed. Therefore you get the quality that you get. No way to increase that without more money or longer schedules.

Trouble with Technical Books

I self-register as a PL/SQL Oracle database developer with my company. So it came as no surprise when I got a targeted email from my company. It highlighted the book Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions.

This book is ancient. It was published back in 2004. The funny thing is that most of the information is still relevant today. I checked on Amazon. There seems to be an update to the book from 2013. But it is selling used for $800. WTF?

I went through the introduction section of the book. It had me set up auto trace in my Oracle database instance. Also read up on sql trace and using tkprof. Not bad seeing how I have not even made it to Chapter 1 yet.

The only downside is that the book is made available to me through the Books 24x7 web site. My company has some sort of bulk license with them. The web user interface is painful. I had to go through each page. But the pages do not fit on my screen. So there is a lot of scrolling with their custom controls.

I tried to print out a copy of the book. I have the ability to print to a file. Unfortunately the Books 24x7 site intercepts print requests. All I got in the output was a page with copyright information on it. How useless.

So I went through the whole book, copy and pasting the pages into Word documents, one per chapter. Now I can read in my leisure. I could buy myself a copy from Amazon. New ones go for $19. I can also pick up a used copy there for under $8. Could be a good investment.