RE: EXT :Stupid software requirements - need your examples
- From: "Schauss, Peter (IT Solutions)" <peter.schauss@xxxxxxx>
- To: "gints.plivna@xxxxxxxxx" <gints.plivna@xxxxxxxxx>, Oracle L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:55:40 +0000
Here is one that I inherited. The environment was a COTS CRM application with
significant customizations. Management reports for things like SLA's were run
off of a data warehouse. A consulting company had been initially hired to
design the data warehouse and the ETL process based on a requirement to move
data to the warehouse once a day. By the time I assumed DBA responsibilities
the whole system had been running in production for about four years. Shortly
after I arrived management decided that since the whole environment was mature
they no longer needed the guy who supported Informatica, the package that was
running the ETL's.
My manager asked me to look into what we could do to make the ETL's run faster,
like maybe reorganize some tables. Investigating, I found that they were
running a full ETL (the one that the consultant had designed to be run once a
day) every hour and the ETL's were taking 65 to 75 minutes. At this point I
knew nothing about the design history of the project so I did not know that
the ETL's were originally designed to be run once a day. In a conversation
with Informatica the tech support the guy mentioned something about incremental
versus full ETL's and a light bulb came on. I started asking questions and
learned that the customer had complained that their updates were not showing up
in the reports so they changed from running the full ETL once a day to running
four times a day. Apparently, that was not enough, so they switched to running
them hourly.
I did a bit on analysis and found that the longest step in the ETL process was
taking 14 to 20 minutes each time it ran. A 10046 trace showed that this step
updating every row of a 1.1 million row table (plus adding a few new rows)
every hour. Fewer than 1% of the rows in that table, however, were actually
changing.
- Peter Schauss
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Gints Plivna
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 9:17 AM
To: Oracle L
Subject: EXT :Stupid software requirements - need your examples
Hello!
I'm quite sure most of you at least once have been in a situation when
you HAD TO implement a requirement, which is stupid, results in slow
performance and in principle cannot be optimized. And you either
silently or loudly blamed the person who could imagine something like
that :)
So (as I'm actually mostly system analyst) I'm seeking examples for a
small presentation to highlight such cases for my colleagues to avoid
them. I know quite many developers blame requirements gatherers and
system analysts for these requirements and they are right, because
such requirements should not be accepted or at least customer has to
be informed about the consequences.
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
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