Re: What counts as technically slick?

From: York, Albert <albert.york@nissan-usa.com>
> Years ago I was called in to work on a new application that was having
> severe performance problems. The designers had come up with a great way
> (they thought) to control file access. For each file, they wrote a "server"
> program. The application programs accessed the file only through these
> server programs. Files were not opened directly, all reads, writes, and
> updates were done through these calls. Naturally this caused a performance
> hit by itself  But on top of that, for some reason, they coded all of these
> server programs to set on LR before returning. We gained big boost simply
by
> removing that one line from each program. Then, as the application was
> maintained, we got rid of the server programs and brought the files back
> into the program.

getting rid off the server programs was not such a great idea. You
just destroyed a reasonable partitioning. Keeping the server programs
would have allowed you to do all kinds of useful stuff: automatic
logging, replacing files with SQL or ODBC-calls and the like.

Make an analogy: suppose you had ALL you date handling take
place through server programs. You are in 1995, you bring all
the date handling back in the programs ("where they belong"),
now someone tells you about Y2K...

Maybe you would have solved the Y2K problem the same way
as they the Aggies did. In early 1999, the IT director reported
to the University that the Y to K problem had been solved: In
all files January was now Januark, February was Februark, ..
also, he was happy to report, as an additional bonus, Monday
was now Mondak, etc.

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