Memory-Lane Monday: So much savings!

VP of development has a brainstorm for saving $40,000 a year: just move a production system to a development machine, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

Says fish: “I immediately contacted the database administrator and told him this was a very bad idea. The DBA said, ‘Of course, I know this! I told the VP we shouldn’t do it. But orders are orders.’”

So the DBA moves the production system for one of the company’s biggest clients onto the development server, and everything runs smoothly.

For about two weeks.

“Then,” says fish, “one of the developers wrote an application that spawned database jobs, in order to break up a large body of work into smaller chunks. But there was a small bug in his application, and when he launched it on the development server, it immediately ran a number of jobs, each of which in turn launched more jobs, until there were thousands of jobs running simultaneously.

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