Introduction

Last week, during a travel in the Benelux, I met a nice guy name Roger (of course it is not a real name). In a bus, we had a friendly chat and after a while, he told me that he was an IT consultant and works as DBA for a famous insurance company in the country.

For the ones who complain of their software editors, I would like to report the Kafkaesque story that Roger told me.

The context

Roger works for a company that uses for years an ERP (let’s name it “J”). The ERP J has been bought by a very famous editor (let’s name it O) that has already in its portfolio another ERP (let’s name it “OA”). Roger manages and monitors the version 9 of the database O used by the ERP J. During many months the EPR and the database worked perfectly together.

First act

Two months ago, for the first time, the database crashed. As Roger is a good DBA, he was able to restore quickly the database. But unfortunately, after few hours the database crashed again. Roger found out a viscous bug in the database and in order to find a solution, he called the O support who was not surprised since the bug was well known. An O consultant told Roger to change a parameter from the value X to Y. “Perfect solution”. The database worked well without crashing. End of the first act.

Second act

After a while the ERP users realizes that the ERP performances decreased and were divided by 10 to 100. Quickly the company found out that the bottleneck came from database. Another O consultant stepped in to optimize the database and diagnosed the problem. THE SOLUTION was quickly found out: The parameter set at the value Y must be set to X. Immediately, Roger reacted and replied that the value X crashed the database.

The solution

The editor admitted the problem and by way of solution proposed to migrate the database from the version 9 to the version 10. Indeed, the new version solved this problem.

Unfortunately at present, the ERP J does not support the version 10 of the O database even if the ERP and the database belong to the same editor. As final solution, O proposed to simply drop the ERP J and rebuild the company organization on the other ERP OA. Of course, O would assist the company during its migration. (What a pitiful solution!!!).

I hope you enjoyed the depressing story of Roger and his database.