Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

Nov 2011

The Temporary Index

by in Representative Line on

By day, Matthew is a highly-paid consultant that travels around globe helping companies develop and optimize application databases. By night, he's a un-paid consultant for a friend that supports a massive, vendor-provided system that cost well in the six figures. And like many enterprisey systems, the quality is inversely proportional to the price.

"They sent me a patch to help speed up the ledger reconciliation report, but it doesn't seem to do anything," Matthew's friend told him, "in fact, it seems to make things go slower."