ARGH

[lothie.livejournal.com]

My customer, who is first line support for HIS customer, had a problem upgrading our product. The problem was with a MS SQL database. After our team wrangled with it for a while, it was escalated to me as the senior member of the team. I asked my customer to send me the database in question.

I played with it for a couple of days and then escalated to development. Our DBA took a look at the database and ascertained that the end user had been manually dyking out bits of tables. When our upgrade scripts ran, they horked on orphan data in other tables. He dyked out the orphan data, we upgraded the database, and I told the user I was sending it back to him. Less than a week had passed since I got my hands on the database.

He then reveals to me that the database he sent me was more than a month old. He wanted to know how he was going to inform the user that they were going to lose all their more recent data...or could we just let them know what fields in what tables to dyke out so that they could perform the upgrade themselves?

Uh, no. If you screw it up, then you'll really be a mess. You mismanaged this situation; you could have asked your customer for their most recent database. Now, here's your upgraded database, you figure out what to tell your user.

GRRR.