Have you ever called a place that needs to look up your account or other info? ever notice how it takes about a some time for them to get that info?
I’m the guy on the other side of the line waiting to get that info so I can help fix what ever problem they had called in with, and the longer i work the more i notice that its taking longer and longer to for me to pull up any info about any account. So whats is the deal, why cant a multi billion dollar company fix a database?
We live in the Age of Information, where almost everything is instant, where people expect info or help to be provided to them that instant. My guess is everyone at my place of employment probably don’t even notice the long waits between DB queries through our ticketing system. So how long is long? well i decided to test this, for a basic customer id I queried takes about 20 seconds, ok thats acceptable but thats only to bring up there info, not there ticket history. So i click on there history, guess what another 30 seconds on the clock, so it starting to get bad, after that you can click on individual tickets, create a new one or use tabs to look at more info. Each tab when clicked on takes 5-25 seconds to open. And these are the fast times, other times i sit 30 secs to about 1 min to get anything useful, and there have been times that I started a query when I left for break , came back and still had 5 mins to wait till it finally showed some results. My querries where presise and dont pull alot of data, but this is getting ridicolous. So how does a database get this slow? traffic? Nope cant be traffic, I work 3 rd shift and have about 15 people who use it , during the day over 100 people use it. What about maitnence? not likely, thats run once a week for about 2 hours or so.
What else could it be? corrupted database? bad design for a large database? I have never worked with a large database like that before so I don’t know the challenges of design or maintenance of such a large beast. But I have worked with smaller DBs that had similar slowdowns, but that was caused by too much data being pulled, like querying the entire DB or a few thousand rows. Or could the bandit be the vendor lock on the ticketing system in combo there DB, by the way the ticketing system looks very customized and even has features, custom built by other vendors, like the data being pulled from an access database or integration into 2 other ticketing systems. My guess is Oracles Seibel, and DB work wonders out of the box and setup correctly even better when you use there system to input the data. I wonder who approved adding more plugins was a great idea? This kind of bloat is inexcusable in a place where employees are timed. How do you fix something thats going to get screwed anyways, there policy just keep it chugging along, my solution would be to start gettting rid of or migrating 3yr+ old tickets and closed accounts to another DB, at least it would be a start, next would be to start removing the bloat from system, we do not need it to make our coffee and tell us were great. We need something light fast and simple, all we want to do is get the person what they want and move on. What will it take for these so called decision makers to realize that there all in one application dream doesn’t work in reality. Maybe this will become the next epic IT failure? not likely because its behind closed doors and if it failed i doubt that they would even tell the employees. So far i enjoy working for the smaller company, at least your voice is heard unlike here where your the bottom of the barrel.
Sorry about the long rant but some things at large companies are inexcusable that can throw money at situations. I thought customer service was supposed to be the focus of what we do. When will the people who call the shots going to learn to think logical instead of using a magic 8 ball and some business lingo to make decisions about technology.
