‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’
One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change
Who, Me? Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Holden” who told us a tale from a time his employer “had just gone through implementation hell for a shiny new ERP system.”
“We went down the 'managed build' route with the software provider and the project overran by 12 months,” he lamented.
The result was a system Holden described as “quite buggy” and lacking sophisticated reporting tools.
”For more intricate report extraction we needed to use direct SQL access on the database,” he told Who, Me?
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, about six months into operation of this ERP Holden heard his boss start to repeatedly mutter “Oh god” in an increasingly panicked tone.
“His face had turned an interesting shade of puce and he looked a little uncomfortable,” Holden wrote. “It transpired he'd accidentally wiped a key piece of data from our expense transactions which left them all in a hung state and unable to be processed.”
Holden found a shadow table that made it possible to reconstruct the missing data.
“You'd think at this point we would have learned our lesson,” Holden told Who, Me?
Of course they hadn’t.
- Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware
- Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice
- Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company
- Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it
Two months later another team member approached the boss’s desk and admitted to “a bit of a problem – I've accidentally deleted some relations.”
He’d actually deleted them all. While constructing a complex query, he dropped the main relational table for the general ledger.
“This necessitated a company-wide ‘The ERP is down for emergency maintenance’ notification, and a rapid restore from the previous evening’s backup,” Holden told Who, Me?
After that mess, Holden said the company issued strict instructions that the team must always use the BEGIN TRANSACTION , ROLLBACK TRANSACTION, and COMMIT TRANSACTION commands!
What terms have you used to obfuscate your mistakes? Click here to share your weasel words with Who, Me? We’d love to share them with readers in a future edition. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
