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Top-level
@saddestrobots Ten years ago, I worked for a company with "Reimbursement" in the name of the company. We had a DB table column where it was spelled: reimbrusment It's in the name of the god damn company, and someone couldn't spell it right. And since it was in a vital (and quite large) table, we couldn't just fix it without massive database downtime. I bet it still hasn't been fixed. 11 comments
 @Azuaron @saddestrobots I’ve analyzed applications with millions of users that had the application name (which is also the company name) misspelled internally. Clearly, this was a load bearing typo.  @WPalant @iacore @saddestrobots While I was there, we switched from Rackspace to a cloud hosting service*. This is how I learned that the database only worked if the whole thing, all 80 GB of it, was in memory. The new cloud host didn't have a database with that much RAM, so we shipped them our server from Rackspace and they connected it to their cloud. * that cost twice as much as AWS and had half as many features; the engineers suspected the CTO had some kind of personal kickback arrangement. @Azuaron @saddestrobots r.i.p. no corporate structure to stop this? using number of features on AWS as a comparison... no. just no. they literally promote anyone who make a feature in some obscure market space that's barely usable. @argv_minus_one @saddestrobots Holy shit. I was pretty new to databases when I worked at that company, so when the senior engineers said, "It will take a long time to rename the column because the table is big," I just believed them. But, yeah, that's not how that works. So, the question is, were they--the SENIOR engineers---as clueless as I was, or were they lying so they didn't have to fix the typo (and everywhere in the code the typo had propagated to)?  Yeah, I was thinking it wouldn't be database downtime as such, but rather downtime for all of the applications that use it. All of them have to be brought down before the column is renamed, and then updated and brought back up. I take it there are many applications using this database, not just one, so yeah, that could add up to a lot of downtime. @argv_minus_one @saddestrobots No, just one. 😂 When they added another application, they added a new database, with a series of cron scripts to sync the data between the applications. |
Gregory's Server
@Azuaron
@saddestrobots
Easier to change the name of the company to match, surely.