The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Recent Feature Articles

Some Version of a Process

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-09-22

When you're a large company, like Oracle, you can force your customers to do things your way. "Because we said so," is something a company like that can get away with. Conversely, a small company is more restricted- you have to work hard to keep your customers happy.

When Doreen joined Initech, they were a small company with a long history and not too many customers. In the interests of keeping those customers happy, each customer got their own custom build of the software, with features tailored to their specific needs. So, Initrode was on "INITRODE.9.1", while the Soggy Beans coffee shop chain was on "SOGGY.5.2". Managing those versions was a pain, but it was Doreen's boss, Elliot, who ensured that pain escalated to anguish.

6 comments - Last comment @ 07:27

Classic WTF: Crazy Like a Fox(Pro)

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-09-06

It's Labor Day in the US. We're busy partaking in traditional celebrations, which depending on who you ask, is either enjoying one of the last nice long weekends before winter, or throwing bricks at Pinkertons. So we dig back into the archives, for a classic story about databases. Original --Remy

“Database portability” is one of the key things that modern data access frameworks try and ensure for your application. If you’re using an RDBMS, the same data access layer can hopefully work across any RDBMS. Of course, since every RDBMS has its own slightly different idiom of SQL, and since you might depend on stored procedures, triggers, or views, you’re often tied to a specific database vendor, and sometimes a version.

And really, for your enterprise applications, how often do you really change out your underlying database layer?

12 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-15