• (nodebb)

    Given that comparing a CHAR(5) field to a less-than-five string literal should either fail miserably (some functional equivalent of throw std::runtime_error(...); ?) or autopad the string with enough copies of a suitable character (of which there is one, a space), I don't really see the problem with the first one.

    And certainly it seems bizarre to depend on the behaviour if it isn't "autopad". (Unless, perhaps, the string literal can be a ? in a parameterised query.)

  • (nodebb)

    And that is why single point of contact.... Not "track down all the places".... "update the ONE place where you have interacted with that third party you don't control"...... Oh wait, that actually requires some planning, designing and good engineering practices.

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered)

    I'm curious. Why the distinction between "whale" customers and "minnow" customers?

    I've never personally encountered a "whale" customer that is somehow immune to breaking changes, or even one that has a sufficiently good process to avoid dumb engineering mistakes when addressing an external API.

    Perhaps I'm unlucky, or perhaps I'm right in thinking that the only difference between a "whale" customer and a "minnow" customer is the magnitude of the pain that ensues.

  • Greg (unregistered) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    If the whale customer complains loudly enough there's a change the change will get dissed.

  • LCrawford (unregistered) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    In this case for multiple breaking changes, the whale customer is swimming in the ocean, and Amazon is dangling the bait of changing their system in order to get a big sale.

  • Hal (unregistered)

    I am not a huge defender of cloud here but how different is this really? I mean unless you writing batch COBOL apps in IBM land where little software you could possible write truly exists in either a vacuum or a world where all third party components are reliably static foreves..

    In the back office chances are pretty good if your application is doing anything non-trivial there have been changes platform operating system changes, or changes to supporting resources like SQL databases that required some adaptations. In the front office all sorts of userland stuff has shifted around both on Windows and */Linux platforms. Web applications have more than likely again had to confirm to new broweser policies etc unless they were trivial.

    About the only advantage you have over the cloud here is maybe you can 'upgrade' on your own schedule but that inst really true either if you customers want to install the new hotness OS or browser, and in the backroom once you mix in security and compliance requirements you are also mostly in the position of saying how high when you are told to jump.

    I understand when Remy is coming from because yes back in 2003 you could kind get away with 'look just nobody talk about the NT3.51 box in the corner over there running the win16 app none of us want to touch, OK" but I have not seen a place where that kinda thing will fly in a very long time - even with virtualization and containers.

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    My experienced working for a whale on Amazon was that Amazon didn't care much what we wanted either. That be many whales in the ocean.

  • Brian (unregistered)

    I'm with Remy on this one, I often lament the trend of everything going to SaaS. There is a place for it, sure, but for others like Jira - how much UI churn do you really need in your bug-tracker? Even the personal budget app that I use decided to release their next version as SaaS, although budgeting isn't exactly the sort of process that needs continuous tweaking. Seems to me it's more of a money grab in a lot of cases. Why sell someone a piece of software when you can instead hold all their data hostage for a monthly ransom?

    I've also been on the other end, as my last two jobs have involved SaaS products (hey, that's where the work is these days...). One loud customer wants a change, so you make the change and roll it out the next week, and then another loud customer complains that all their stuff just broke and they want things back the way they were. You can't win.

  • Nony Mouse (unregistered) in reply to my name is missing

    Compared to Amazon everyone else in the ocean is a minnow anyway.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Nony Mouse

    I can't remember if the US Federal Government are AWS customers (or if they went to someone else in the end) but they're the sort of customer that truly counts as a whale in this context. In particular, they're big enough that there'd be multiple people within the cloud provider whose job is exactly to keep the whale happy. Of course, this is a case where the whale is not just able to take their business elsewhere but also start legal or even legislative processes to make things very unhappy, so discouraging such things is of near supreme importance.

  • Zradradradcek (unregistered)

    AWS' most influential customer is the whale known as the rest of Amazon. Some AWS product or service wanted this, and the rationale was conjured up.

  • (nodebb)

    BTW, the new string comparison functionality simply brings the product into ANSI SQL compliance, I personally think it's a bug fix and whomever wrote the docs put in the wrong explanation for the change.

    The fact that most database typically ignore trailing spaces and most languages treat them as significant is a nontrivial source of work for me. I spend a lot of time modernizing applications that used to have a bunch of logic embedded in queries strewn throughout the codebase. This is one of the things that causes differences in behavior when replacing code with other code that seems equivalent via a cursory inspection.

  • (nodebb)

    The problem with cloud being updated is that you have no choice in the matter. With on premise, you can delay the upgrade. With cloud, they tell you the date when you have to upgrade, do or die.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Brian

    It's also a maintenance issue. With SaaS, they can keep everyone on the same version so when someone calls support the first question isn't "What version of the software are you running"? and "Oh...you'll have to upgrade before we can support you..."

  • browserless (unregistered)

    Missing dependencies always got me. And for some you have to make your database public.

    It does seem like the default commodity is always going to be a host you SSH into for a CLI. Serverless has that feel of Bob Villa on TV selling something new to replace the threaded fastener.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Brian

    We're adding SaaS to our software because it's a customer demand. Demographic trends mean the IT worker shortage will only become worse and thus companies start outsourcing what they can before their last administrators retire.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    A "whale" customer is one for which a vendor will redesign their hardware to suit (this is from a friend who worked for a whale, for whom a billion-dollar corporation vendor made custom hardware changes in their product).

  • Pomidor (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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