I’m going to be in Sunriver late tonight. We’re completely restructuring our availability database here at the office for our reservation system and we have to change a pile of fields in the database, and rebuild the thing. And I have to rebuild after each of four different steps, and each rebuild takes about 40 minutes.
The office is buying us pizza today, that’s for sure. Blogging back to normal tomorrow after I recover from this mess.
Comments
What database are you running? MS SQL Server?
I wish. While that would still suck, it wouldn’t suck as bad as what I’m running. I, honestly, don’t know what DB system it’s using (it’s a DOS-based software), but I have a sneaky feeling it’s using an old Turbo C/Borland database backend. Basically dumps an bunch of *.idx/*.fil files in the directory. It really sucks, and I would love to replace it with a SQL-compliant system (you should see the psycho-language the thing uses to generate reports).
Yeesh… sounds like it could be a dbase format, or filemaker or something awful… that’s disturbing. Though, the environmental system (heating & cooling) here at work–in a relatively new building–runs on a DOS-based system that requires–I kid you not–logging in via modem at 9600 baud….
9600-baud…man, I haven’t seen that kind of blistering speed since dialing into BBSes back in the day 😉
I actually got a sales pitch from a guy that wanted to replace our employee tracking system (we have employees that login from homes via the phones). His hardware? A 233mhz Pentium running DOS with a crapload of modems. And to operate it, I had to know a ton of phone commands, because you couldn’t actually do anything on the console.
What’s worse, is that you can’t have a DOS box open in Windows to use the damn thing… you have to escape out of Windows entirely to DOS mode! It’s craptacular. I have a hard time accepting that in the year 2004 we are still reliant upon DOS software for, well, anything.
And, uhm, wow. Did you tell him 1996 called and wanted its technology back?
1996 hell, DOS control systems and 9600 baud modems sounds like late 80’s at best 🙂