Please...oh please stop

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I am sitting here just wanting to shoot myself.

CompanyA is a hotel. Their reservation program relies on Pervasive SQL. They have ten user licenses for Pervasive. They also happen to have somewhere between eleven and fifteen users that need to use the reservation program. Plus one user license has to be kept free at all times so that people can reserve rooms on their website.

See the problem?
Yeah.

Now, for whatever reason, they've never had a problem in the past. Most of the time they don't go over nine people using the reservation program at any one time. But sometimes they do. They've never encountered any errors before. Two days ago, they started running into problems, most noticeably people being unable to go to their reservation site.
I call the tech support for the reservation program and am told that the error message we are receiving is related to them going over their user licenses in Pervasive. Makes sense to me. Now they have two options.
1) Buy more Pervasive user licenses
2) Get their tech to sit on the phone and argue that they've never had a problem in the past and therefore they shouldn't be required to buy more licenses now.

Guess which one they decided to go with?

Yeah.

Someone shoot me.

Reservation Program technician? I am so very, very sorry.
(Hold times are usually a couple of hours with this company so I'm just sitting here waiting.)

Comments

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

Yuck.

I've run into Pervasive licensing issues in the past (it handles the backend for a lot of our clients' various and sundry crapplications), but I've never had to actually buy more licenses. And certainly never had to argue for them for free.

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

You poor bastard *passes bottle of Southern Comfort*

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I agree with them that it's weird that before they didn't have problems and now they do. Weird. Yup. But good lord. It doesn't freaking matter! You are over the license number. Suck it up, be thankful you got away with it for whatever reason to this point, and BUY MORE LICENSES.

*snort*

I hate wasting my time on stupid shit like this.

My guess is that somehow somewhere there was a bug that they were unintentionally taking advantage of that just now has been fixed.

"Please Mr Tech man, break your software again just for me?" Ughhhh.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

3.) Switch to a SQL server which does not use per-seat licensing.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

Yeah right. This is a place that is still using the DOS version of their reservation program even though the company developed a very nice graphical interface YEARS ago. Why? They don't want to take the time and money to train on the new interface.

Getting them to change anything, even when it will help them immensely, is akin to pulling teeth. From an angry grizzly bear. After taking her cubs.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

That's the beauty of it though - done correctly, you should just be able to change the backend without affecting the frontend at all...

Bwaaaahahahahaaaa...

Sorry, I almost believed myself for a minute.. I bet there's some variety of platform specific nonstandard SQL in there which will completely throw a wrench in things.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

The reservation software specifically requires Pervasive. I might be able to hack a different SQL into place, but I seriously doubt it. And it's not worth my time to try. :)

For what it's worth, the RDP tech guy and I had a nice chat, discussed the idiocy of management, and agreed that more licenses needed to be purchased.

[jecook]

*facepalm*