[geeks] funny way to start the day

[Ken Hansen]

When I worked for a large mainframe software house I supported an
application development product called UFO (User Files Online), which had
it's own trivial database called IOX. IOX was a kludge (at best), but it was
fine for storing the code users generated.

    We *explicitly* told our userd not to use IOX for production data,
    as if it became corrupted (which it did, often), the only recourse was
    to recover from a recent backup.

    This warning was on the third page of the manual, a single small
paragraph
    in the middle of an otherwise blank page.

So of course, we had a client that used IOX for production data. And of
course, the database got corrupted. So, when the client called us up asking
us to recover the database, we pointed to the third page of the manual and
said the only recourse was to recover from a recent backup.

He said that was unacceptable, we had to recover the DB ASAP!

I asked him how recently he had backed up his database.

They stopped backing the database up *six* months ago! It seems the backups
were taking too long (exceeding their batch-window each night) - IOX used
its own utilities, and the only useful backup method was to use the IOX
utilities, nothing else would work.

I passed the call to my manager. There was nothing we could do for them,
period.

They were not happy...

BTW - the tools were fine, for their intended use - UFO could use VSAM,
DB/2, IMS, and flat files... There was no reason to use IOX unless you were
using it for development/test purposes...

Ken


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