Death By a Thousand Cuts

In case I haven't mentioned it before, I work for a fairly immature IT organization. We're heading in the right direction mind you, but defined and documented processes don't really exist.

Yesterday I went back and forth with our QA department about two truncate table statements. We had performed this in production before and we didn't change the code. It needed to be tested and I needed to do a unit test plan. Today I needed UAT signoff. What? There's no business user.

Our EDI group is overtaxed right now, so I wrote a process to delete data in "their" database on tables that they created. Part of that process was to drop the constraints and then recreate them with the ON DELETE CASCADE rule. Amusingly, they created most of them with the SET NULL rule and then had NOT NULL constraints on those columms. Sweet. I needed to do all this and finally delete the data, of course none of the environments (DEV/TEST/PROD) are the same, so what worked in DEV didn't work in TEST. I'm guessing that as soon as it is deployed in PROD, I will have missed something else. I'll look like the idiot too. Did I mention that I have to create indexes for all those foreign keys? No, well, I did. Otherwise the process would take days to complete. There are some 13 tables in total. Three child tables of the parent table and then multiple child tables of those child tables. Awesome!

I'm on my fifth day of trying to complete a "simple" delete now.

Since the FBI raided, QA has become more strict. OK, understandable, but there was never a notice saying so, nor what the new rules would be.

I finally get my final approval and the work orders are created. Release Management gives me the all clear (the files were staged for the DBAs). I ran over to let them know and he wants to go through the instructions before I leave to make sure everythings clear. We then go into the staging folder and only two of the eight files are there. Deep breath. I call the Release Management group and let them know. It will be an hour before they get home.

I know that was an honest mistake. When I went back to make sure I filled out all the forms correctly I realized that I had left one file off of my build list, so I originally only had seven.

DBA just called and he was slammed with other critical deployments/production problems and wasn't able to get to it tonight. It would happen in the morning.

A "simple" delete will have taken seven days to complete.

Slow slicing indeed...