A New Bean

It was Paramdeep's first corporate IT job. He was assigned a mentor, Rajiv, who would train him up on the application he would be supporting: a WebSphere-based Java application full of Enterprise Java Beans.

Paramdeep reserved time with Rajiv in Outlook, arranging to meet at Rajiv's cubicle for half an hour. Rajiv accepted. At the agreed-upon time, Paramdeep walked over with a notebook and pencil in hand, intent on copying down all the pertinent information he would hear. When he reached Rajiv's desk, however, the elder developer waved Paramdeep away from his spare chair before he had a chance to sit down.

"Sorry, more urgent stuff came up," Rajiv said, turning back to his monitor. "The best way to learn about the application is to dive right in. I'll give you one of the simpler tasks. All you need to do is write a bean that'll call a Sybase stored procedure to get the next sequence ID of a domain table, then create the next object based on that ID."

Paramdeep stood there wide-eyed and frozen, pencil hovering uselessly over paper. "What?"

"I've already built an EJB for the database connection layer and all the handling code," Rajiv continued, still intent on his screen. "There's also a stored procedure in the common schema for getting the ID. You just have to put them all together."

"Uh-?"

"I'll send an email with the relevant class names," Rajiv cut him off.

"OK. I'll, uh, let you know if I have any trouble?"

Rajiv was too caught up in his urgent business to respond.

Paramdeep staggered back to his desk: scared, confused, and a bit dejected. But hey, maybe Rajiv was right. Once he dove into the code, he'd have a better understanding of what to do. He'd done JDBC before. It wasn't hard.

Unfortunately, there was a stark difference between a computer science student's homework assignments and the inner workings of a creaky, enterprisey corporate behemoth. Try as he might, Paramdeep simply couldn't connect to the database schema Rajiv had told him about. He was connecting to a default schema instead, which lacked the stored procedure he needed. All of Paramdeep's attempts to solicit help from Rajiv-whether emailed, messaged, or sought in person-met with failure. His boss promised to get Rajiv talking, but that promise never materialized into Paramdeep and Rajiv spending quality time together.

A strict deadline was looming. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Paramdeep emailed the database developer, Amita, suggesting his solution: creating a new stored procedure to call and return the value from the actual stored procedure, which would then return the value to his new bean.

Minutes later, his phone rang. Caller ID showed it was Amita.

"You can't possibly want this!" she declared without preamble. "Just use the stored procedure in the schema."

"I can't connect to it," Paramdeep explained.

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"I just can't!"

"Who's the tech lead on this project?"

"Rajiv."

"Ohhh." A weary understanding permeated her tone, taking all the fight out of it. "OK, I get it. Fine, I'll make a synonym in the default schema."

And that was why the ID generating procedure also existed in the default schema. Paramdeep couldn't help but wonder how many of the procedures in the default schema had gotten there this way.

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