Fellow programmers will feel my pain

[pbray]

We're in the midst of a crash development project, that's being sandwiched in around November close, prep for year-end and everyone's understandable desire to take vacation days before they lose them.

The goal is to build a new subset of the corporate spend database. Last week they created a test database for this project and I've been asked to pull sample data to load into it so we can start the analysis.

- The corporate spend database model has 12 dimensions.
- The test model that they built for me has 18 dimensions. The person who built it is on vacation this week and no one can explain why we have the 6 extra dimensions, or whether or not it is safe to delete them and go back to the regular 12 dimensions.
- The SQL queries that load the corporate spend model create an output file with 42 fields (dimensions). Several of these dimensions are obvious duplicates (three different formats for department numbers, for instance) but no one can explain to me which of the 42 fields are used to load the 12 dimensions in the corporate model and which ones are ignored. The expert on this is too busy to talk to me, and the backups are... you guessed it, on vacation.

And now the project lead is IM'ing me to ask why we haven't been able to load sample data yet.

Comments

[tryslora]

Ow. What's sad is how typical that all sounds? For another giggle, I assume there's no documentation to map the data?

I hope you can get it smoothed out with a minimum of bloodshed and tearing out of hair!

[pbray.livejournal.com]

This is why we are all in virtual teams with no one sitting in the same location, because if I sat next to these folks it would be stabbity-stabbity time.

But yeah, it's pretty typical to be explaining to people that databases aren't like suitcases, you can't just cram in extra things in the side pockets and hope no one notices.

[tryslora]

Virtual teams definitely sounds like a Good Thing! As long as there are no Voodoo dolls involved...

*snort* What, we're not supposed to have data spilling over the edges in random order, and just pray it dances itself into line when we ask nicely?

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Most departments in Megacorps are now virtual teams-- no one sits in the same location, instead we all work from various corporate locations (or from our homes) around the world. Which is good in one way-- when jennifer_dunne got engaged, she was able to move to Colorado and keep her job, since working from home means any home any where. But it's bad for things that require close collaboration, where it would be a whole lot easier if the programmers could just get together for coffees (or beers) and thrash things out.