I’m two days into a new contract, hows it going? Just don’t ask! How do I feel, well this morning there was a news article about 170 million year old dinosaur footprints on the Isle-of-Skye and I am so disappointed to be working with those self same dinosaurs 170 million years later!
What am I working on, it’s the first Solaris 11.3 implementation in a major utility company. Today we had the kickoff meeting, the timetable is tight I have to migrate a critical application in 11 weeks. It has to move to a new operating system and a new platform, it has massive legacy dependencies and it looks like it could be interesting.
Then why am I frustrated, well read on and I’ll let you know. It all revolves around the attitude of the leads in the IT department, pr more likely the lack of leadership in the IT department. So I have been back on this site as a contractor three times, first to migrate the Data Center as part of a large team – one of the best teams that I have ever had the good fortune to work with.
So I have been looking at just one thing at the moment, which is the upgrade of a Solaris 10 sparse zone to Solaris 11.3. Pretty simple you say, well it would be but it includes an Oracle 11g database that has to be upgraded to Oracle 12c. But the issues don’t stop there, as quick and dirty fix in the past there have been some interesting working methods implemented. As an example we have incoming data flows that have to go through an Oracle 7.3.4 database, then an Oracle 8 and an Oracle 10 database before arriving at an Oracle 11g database and now just for fun we’ll be replacing the 11g Database with an Oracle 12c database. What a complete fuck up, all I have to say on the matter.