Re: OT: The Geek defense



--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."
"tim" <TimJ@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13se38ce5kkamae@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:19:34 +0000, tim wrote:

Sorry about that.

The stories about working all weekend reminded me of a couple of things...

One was the anxiety that accompanied a major production change. On one
occasion I designed a whole lot of changes designed to make the system run
faster, as there were response time problems. On paper they looked great,
and I even wrote and ran a small IMS simulator and it looked good there as
well. However when we stress tested it, it ran fast alright, until IMS
crashed. It lasted about 20 minutes between crashes. It turned out that
the increased intensity of multiprocessing brought out some latent bugs in
IMS and caused the crashes. Eventually IBM fixed the bugs and the changes
went in OK, but I was sweating that weekend.

Bugs in IMS?! Go wash your mouth out with soap.... :-)

IMS was the first Database system I ever worked with. (everything before
that had been ISAM/VSAM). I had just read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
maintenance" (1974), so all I could see was hierarchies everywhere :-).

Some purists objected to the need to traverse a hierarchy in order to get to
the part you actually wanted (especially between dequeue boundaries in
IMS/DC, where it was pretty crap to get back to the access point in the
hierarchy that we had been at before the user pressed Enter. Then we
discovered the "C" command code and there was no stopping us... :-)

I was one of thise who resented the evangelical zeal of the DB2 squad in
1983 but, just like Saul, on the road to Damascus, I did the DB2 course in
Reading and the scales fell from my eyes...:-) (Never underestimate the
hypnotic brainwashing ability of IBM and their instructors...)

Happy times... :-)



Another time, I proposed massively increasing the number of streams in the
overnight batch run. The sequential IO in IMS Fastpath was very slow and
we needed the streams to run all the CPUs to capacity and get the run
finished as fast as possible.

I remember marvelling at the clever way IBM labelled something "Fastpath"
and this persuaded people it actually was faster... when it very often
wasn't... :-)

Again I had modeled the changes and I they
had been stress tested. However computer ops were making all sorts of
objections, for no obvious reason. One day the manager made the comment
that "You systems programmers have no idea what we go through out here. If
you spent a night out here you would really understand." So I went out to
the computer center and spent the night talking to the operators. A very
enjoyable experience, if tiring. The amazing thing was after that the
changes sailed through with no objections. Once they felt we understood
their problems they were happy to co-operate.

You received a valuable insight on that occasion. One of the reasons I like
to use Joint Application Development (JAD) where tech people work closely
together with the business, is for precisely that reason.

Good experiences; thanks for postig them.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."


.

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