A Stressful Day

Today I had plenty of stuff to do.

I had to write a query pulling data from all over the database, and it was requested by someone who doesn't know much about the database. To put this in perspective, I'm pulling from three tables with over 230 MILLION entries in them, each. Combined, they probably add up to over 1 billion rows. That's a lot.

To make things worse, sometimes things aren't named in the most intuitive way in the database. So, the person requests a certain data field, not knowing what's involved to actually get it to them. I spent most of the morning testing this huge query (just to do little test things to make sure it had the data I wanted). I gave him a little sample of the query for him to CHECK and make sure it was what he wanted, and so that he could crosscheck it with other reports he had to make sure it was correct. On top of the fact of me not knowing the exact structure of what the structure of the database was, I wasn't sure if the somewhat vague field names were what I wanted.

Then, once you think you've got it and you show it to them, they go "Oh, by the way we need you to do this." Little do they know you need to restructure the ENTIRE query to do so. And, it is almost the same complexity as asking your uncle's neighbor's step-sister's ex-boyfriend what the name of his dog is. Each person representing a database table.

My coworker who assigned me to do this for them usually doesn't deal with big queries like this, so I guess that's why I was doing them. I was kind of in the dark as to what all the fields and tables meant. When I said that this guy wanted some more hard-to-find fields, he kind of gave me a vibe that we didn't need to do them, so I was confused.

After this guy gave me the go ahead to run these reports for all the dates in the range, I processed the queries. Both took over 40 minutes.

Guess what. Something was wrong in both of them. Goodie. He said we would work on it tomorrow and send me test data to compare it against.

What? Test Data? Why didn't he give me this before? That would have helped leaps and bounds. Whatever.

Again I was called to save the day for Barnes and Noble. Hooray. Basically, in a discussion whether we should do some data file work or they should do some data file work, the decision ended up where we would have to do this data file work.

That means, manually editing all these files. Or, in another words, me writing a script so to do it automatically for thousands of orders.

I finally got it all working, and then I talked to my coworker and went home. I have to process like...50 or so files in the morning with this script, so that will be fun. Hoo-ray.

Yea, Tuesday lunch, same old, same old. While I was eating lunch, on my break, I received word that one of the big e-commerce sites I managed went down. Yahoo did something to their servers which affected how I programmed the website, so it went haywire. Luckily I made a Band-Aid fix on it in as little as 5-10 minutes, but some stuff wasn't up to snuff. It will just have to wait till I get home. Which has been busy, to say the least.