Roger and his database

Introduction

Last week, I tripped in the Belgium and I met a nice guy called Roger (of course it is not a material public figure). In a bus, we had a friendly chat and after a while, he told me that he was an IT consultant and works as a DBA for a renowned insurance company.

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

The context

Roger's company has used for years the ERP JD Edwards. Recently, JD Edwards has been bought by Oracle which has other ERP in its portfolio such as Oracle Applications. Roger manages and monitors Oracle DB V9 used by JD Williams. For months the EPR and the database worked perfectly together.

First act

Two months ago, for the first time, the database crashed. Roger is a good DBA and was able to quickly restore the database. Alas, afterwards a few hours the database went down again. Roger found out a sticky bug in the database and to ascertain a resolution, he shouted out the Oracle support which was not surprising since the bug was easily recognized. An Oracle consultant told Roger to change a parameter "P" from the value X to Y. "Perfect solution". The database worked well and did not crash anymore. End of the first act.

Second act

A few days after the cash episode, the users complained that the ERP performances decreased by 10 to 100. Quickly the company found out that the bottleneck came from the database. Another Oracle consultant stepped in to optimize the database and diagnosed the problem. THE SOLUTION was quickly found out: The parameter "P" set to the value Y must be set to X. Immediately, Roger reacted and replied that the value X crashed the database.

The solution

Oracle took the problem and suggested to migrate the database from the version 9 to the version 10. Indeed, the new version solved this problem.

Alas, the JD Williams does not plump for the version 10 of Oracle databases, even if the ERP and the database belong to the same editor. As a final solution, Oracle offered to simply drop, JD Williams from the company and rebuild the organization with Oracle Applications. Of course, Oracle would assist the company during its migration. (What a pitiful solution!!!).

Happy end

The CTO aware of this problem saw red and threaten the editor to withdraw all the Oracle products if a solution was not find asap. During the week, a patch was sent to Roger and all the issues were fixed.

I trust you enjoyed the depressing tale of Roger and his database...