The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Cluster#$%&

by Mark Bowytz in Best of… on 2024-07-11

Reliability is its own, very important art. Unless you're, say, Google, you shouldn't write your own reliability systems, but instead buy solutions from a vendor. Just not this vendor. Original. --Remy

Image credit: 'Mark Bowytz' - REMEMBER THE KRAKEN!!! It was a little past 4AM when Massimo's support pager went off, jarring him awake. Without even looking at the pager or logging into his laptop, he flipped on the television to Channel 242: the Video on Demand channel for the Italian TV broadcaster that he worked for.

Nothing.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2024-07-17

Classic WTF: DATABASE ABNORMALIZATION 101

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2022-06-13

It's that time of year, we're taking a brief little summer break this week, and thus reaching back into the archives for some classics. Enjoy these, and in the meantime, keep those submissions coming! For today, we have a unique way to keep track of when classes start… Original. --Remy

Working as a DBA in academia, Paul received a notice that a certain newly migrated user schema, specifically the one used by the enrollment tracking system, had swelled to 281 tables and was growing. This had struck Paul as being very strange since the tracking system wasn't all that complicated.

When a student is registering for a class, and want to know if there's room left, they need two pieces of information - the Course ID and the Semester Number.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-21

Classic WTF: Consultants of the Crystal Citadel

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2021-07-05

It's a holiday weekend in the US, so we turn back to 2009, and explore the Crystal Citadel. Don't worry, there's a flow chart. -- Remy

Photo Credit: 'Thristian' @ Flickr It was the mid-1990's and business was booming at the company that Terry worked at. It was booming so much that the existing process of entering an order — faxing in an order form torn out of an outdated-as-soon-as-it-was-printed catalog — was delaying things enough that it was costing the company some serious dough in missed sales. Needing a way to re-engineer the process without hiring an army of support staff, management decided on an innovative plan that would enable customers to place orders electronically without needing to contact customer service.

With resources being tight (even the help desk was fielding order inquiries), management decided to farm out the work to an outside IT firm. Now, important work like this wasn't going to be farmed out to the boss's nephew who was a whiz at programming in Word and Excel. Instead they were going with a big name, "we named our building after ourselves" company. Yes it would be expensive, but the money that could be saved by receiving orders this new way would allow the program to more than pay for itself in short order.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-12