Forums
These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
Let's say you have a database table containing a list of countries. Given the primary key of a country in that table- an arbitrary ID field- you need to look up the name of that country.
Curtis's predecessor dropped this solution:
One of the "features" of the Oracle database is that, in addition to the "wonderful" PL/SQL language for building stored procedures, you can also write stored procedures in Java.
Now, the skills of "being a good database programmer" and "being a good Java programmer" are not necessarily overlapping, especially when you're deep in the world of Oracle's approach to programming. Which is where this submission, from Tomas comes from.
Unfortunately for Elena, the laboratory information management system (LIMS) her team used was being sunsetted by the vendor, Initech. She's a biochemist working in a pathology department, and this software is vital to tracking the tests need, the tests already run, and providing critical notifications about abnormal test results.
Since Initech was sunsetting that product, the hospital system put out an RFQ for a replacements, and after a multi-year bidding process, offered the contract for replacing the software to Initech.
In this week's episode we have some more adventures in shipping and misadventures with dates. I just asked "Hey Google, how many days are there in February THIS year" and they answered confidently "28 days." I briefly considered autoplaying that query on this page to see how many of your devices would answer correctly, but then I decided I should autoplay a command to order me a pizza and then I thought better of the whole thing.
Following up on an earlier submission, Dave P. reports "Much to my amazement, the package did arrive in time for Christmas, but just barely. USPS really came through on their end, taking less than 2 days to deliver the package, after the original delivery service took 12 days to find the USPS dropoff facility." Hah! Somebody owes me a nickel!
Amanda's company wanted to restrict access to a service by filtering on the requestor's IP address. Yes, this is a terrible idea. So they wanted to make it a bit smarter, and also filter on various subnets. But they had a LOT of different subnets.
So the result was this:
Let's say your company wanted to offer special deals. When a customer calls about one of these deals, you want to play an automated customer support message using SignalWire, a tool for scripting phone voice trees.
This is a natural case for using a Map data structure. Which is what Ajay's predecessor did. They just… uh… weren't sure how to use a Map.
Efren's employer recently acquired a competitor. The competitor had been struggling for a number of years, and the acquisition was a last ditch attempt to preserve at least some of the business (a complete closure was the only other option).
Now, "struggling for a number of years" sounds fairly vague, but due to some bad database design, we actually have a clear indicator of exactly when the company gave up:
Luke has inherited a Java Struts-based application. Struts is one of the many Java web frameworks, designed around having HTTP requests trigger actions- that is routing HTTP requests to a specific function call.
Now, on one screen, the user filled in a form, and then the corresponding action on the server side needed to read the form data for an eventId and act upon it. In Struts, this can be very simple: