Model Years
Caleb (previously) continues to work for a vehicle finance company. Most recnetly, he was working on a data ingestion application. Its job was to pull in a big ol' pile of CSVs from a mix of vendors and customers and feed it into a central database to keep things up to date.
"Application", however, is misleading. In reality, it was a suite of Access databases scattered around various network shares. Each represented a custom data loading pathway for a kind of data. It wasn't true that each was isolated from every other- frequently, the data flow would be "Open database \\fileserver\processing\vendor01.mdb, use the form to load the CSV file, then open \\fileserver\processing\process01.mdb, but only AFTER you've deleted the CSV file."
Caleb's job was "easy": trawl through this thicket and figure out which parts handled just vehicle model information, sourced from vehicle manufacturers. Figure out what it did, and then reimplement in something that wasn't a fragile pile of Access databases.
While working on that, a new problem appeared: manufacturers were announcing their 2023 model numbers, but the system simply couldn't ingest those. No vehicles with 2023 model numbers could be created. After searching for awhile, Caleb figured out that it went through this table, created in 2008, which hadn't had any data added/removed since:
| ModelYearAbbr | ModelYear |
|---|---|
| 4 | 2004 |
| 5 | 2005 |
| 6 | 2006 |
| 7 | 2007 |
| 8 | 2008 |
| 9 | 2009 |
| 10 | 2010 |
| 11 | 2011 |
| 12 | 2012 |
| 13 | 2013 |
| 14 | 2014 |
| 15 | 2015 |
| 16 | 2016 |
| 17 | 2017 |
| 18 | 2018 |
| 19 | 2019 |
| 20 | 2020 |
| 21 | 2021 |
Now, this isn't particularly shocking, and honestly, probably wasn't even a terrible idea. It's just that, since new years were never added, it made it impossible to add vehicles in the 2023 model year.
But that still left Caleb with another question: their system had vehicles with a 2022 model year just fine. Did a bug let the data load last time? Is there another code pathway Caleb hasn't found? Is there a mystery Access database on a file share no one remembers that can handle model years more recent than 2021? No one knows, and truly, does anyone want to know? Down that path lies an eldritch madness, a cosmic horror that would cause our very souls to bleed.
(Or, probably, someone just manually inputted all that data, but the eldritch thing is more fun.)
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