yeesh

Well it’s been a while. Sorry about that. Things have been busy. Despite that, little of interest has happened. Yes, I live an exciting life.

Over the weekend we made the first step at migrating one of our in house apps to a customized 3rd party replacement. That 3rd party replacement is soon to be fully developed in house, meaning we’ve migrated from one custom system to another. The system that will slowly be replaced is a cobbled together c++ application that, honestly, I’m surprised has worked as long as it has.

It was developed long before we had database naming and design standards by a group of people who were learning as they went along. Because of this, there are some particularly frightening flaws in the database design. The most annoying is the horrendous naming standards.

For example, a company is a row in the company table, so far so good. Anything that relates to the company is in a comp# table. That is comp1, comp2, comp3 and so on. So contacts are in comp4. Accounts are in comp7. I can’t even imagine what they were thinking.

Anyway, we’ve taken the first step to burying this app, but it is going to be a long process, because it has grown into quite a monster over the years. To make matters worse, there are so many other applications that use data from its database, and they will all need to be modified to use the new program’s data as well. And getting at the data in the new program is difficult because they have taken encapsulation and security to the extreme. But that’s a story for another day.

I hope you all have had a great week so far. Thanks for reading, and be well!