The New Guy (Part II): Database Boogaloo
When we last left our hero Jesse, he was wading through a quagmire of undocumented bad systems while trying to solve an FTP issue. Several months later, Jesse had things figured out a little better and was starting to feel comfortable in his "System Admin" role. He helped the company join the rest of the world by dumping Windows NT 4.0 and XP. The users whose DNS settings he bungled were now happily utilizing Windows 10 workstations. His web servers were running Windows Server 2016, and the SQL boxes were up to SQL 2016. Plus his nemesis Ralph had since retired. Or died. Nobody knew for sure. But things were good.
Despite all these efforts, there were still several systems that relied on Access 97 haunting him every day. Jesse spent tens of dollars of his own money on well-worn Access 97 programming books to help plug holes in the leaky dike. The A97 Finance system in particular was a complete mess to deal with. There were no clear naming guidelines and table locations were haphazard at best. Stored procedures and functions were scattered between the A97 VBS and the SQL DB. Many views/functions were nested with some going as far as eight layers while others would form temporary tables in A97 then continue to nest.
One of Jesse's small wins involved improving performance of some financial reporting queries that took minutes to run before but now took seconds. A few of these sped-up reports happened to be ones that Shane, the owner of the company, used frequently. The sudden time-savings got his attention to the point of calling Jesse in to his office to meet.
"Jesse! Good to see you!" Shane said in an overly cheerful manner. "I'm glad to talk to the guy who has saved me a few hours a week with his programmering fixes." Jesse downplayed the praise before Shane got to the point. "I'd like to find out from you how we can make further improvements to our Finance program. You seem to have a real knack for this."
Jesse, without thinking about it, blurted, "This here system is a pile of shit." Shane stared at him blankly, so he continued, "It should be rebuilt from the ground up by experienced software development professionals. That's how we make further improvements."
"Great idea! Out with the old, in with the new! You seem pretty well-versed in this stuff, when can you start on it?" Shane said with growing excitement. Jesse soon realized his response had backfired and he was now on the hook to the owner for a complete system rewrite. He took a couple classes on C# and ASP.NET during his time at Totally Legit Technical Institute so it was time to put that valuable knowledge to use.
Shane didn't just let Jesse loose on redoing the Finance program though. He insisted Jesse work closely with Linda, their CFO who used it the most. Linda proved to be very resistant to any kind of change Jesse proposed. She had mastered the painstaking nuances of A97 and didn't seem to mind fixing large amounts of bad data by hand. "It makes me feel in control, you know," Linda told him once after Jesse tried to explain the benefits of the rewrite.
While Jesse pecked away at his prototype, Linda would relentlessly nitpick any UI ideas he came up with. If she had it her way, the new system would only be usable by someone as braindead as her. "I don't need all these fancy menus and buttons! Just make it look and work like it does in the current system," she would say at least once a week. "And don't you dare take my manual controls away! I don't trust your automated robotics to get these numbers right!" In the times it wasn't possible to make something work like Access 97, she would run to Shane, who would have to talk her down off the ledge.
Even though Linda opposed Jesse at every turn, the new system was faster and very expandable. Using C# .NET 4.7.1 with WPF, it was much less of an eyesore. The database was also clearly defined with full documentation, both on the tables and in the stored procedures. The database size managed to go from 8 GB to .8 GB with no loss in data.
The time came at last for go-live of Finance 2.0. The thing Jesse was most excited about was shutting down the A97 system and feeling Linda die a little bit inside. He sent out an email to the Finance department with instructions for how to use it. The system was well-received by everyone except Linda. But that still led to more headaches for Jesse.
With Finance 2.0 in their hands, the rest of the users noticed the capabilities modern technology brought. The feature requests began pouring in with no way to funnel them. Linda refused to participate in feature reviews because she still hated the new system, so they all went to Shane, who greenlighted everything. Jesse soon found himself buried in the throes of the monster he created with no end in sight. To this day, he toils at his computer cranking out features while Linda sits and reminisces about the good old days of Access 97.
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