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May 18The New Guy (Part II): Database Boogaloo
by in Feature Articles on 2018-06-14When we last left our hero Jesse, he was wading through a quagmire of undocumented bad systems while trying to solve an FTP issue. Several months later, Jesse had things figured out a little better and was starting to feel comfortable in his "System Admin" role. He helped the company join the rest of the world by dumping Windows NT 4.0 and XP. The users whose DNS settings he bungled were now happily utilizing Windows 10 workstations. His web servers were running Windows Server 2016, and the SQL boxes were up to SQL 2016. Plus his nemesis Ralph had since retired. Or died. Nobody knew for sure. But things were good.
Despite all these efforts, there were still several systems that relied on Access 97 haunting him every day. Jesse spent tens of dollars of his own money on well-worn Access 97 programming books to help plug holes in the leaky dike. The A97 Finance system in particular was a complete mess to deal with. There were no clear naming guidelines and table locations were haphazard at best. Stored procedures and functions were scattered between the A97 VBS and the SQL DB. Many views/functions were nested with some going as far as eight layers while others would form temporary tables in A97 then continue to nest.