(no subject)

OK, i've yet again earned geek points.

My boss came in to my office with a change which needed to be made and stayed around while i was making it- one of our member agencies was being reactivated as an independent after having been a branch of something else.

So I pulled up the database tables and changed a pair of values, and looked- and didn't see the change I expected. So, my next step, after talking to myself trying to walk through if there were any database dependencies i missed (our DB architecture in places is vaguely catacombesque) and decided to connect to one of our test environments to run SQL profiler to show exactly what procedures were run to update which tables.

At this point, after firing up the profiler and completing a trace, i remembered how to do it from the user interface, so i made the appropriate changes and visually verified that they made the change i was pretty certain they did in test. Since they did, i went back to the live service and pulled up the same page there... and found that the agency for which the changes needed to be made now showed that they had.

So— when i can't remember how to make a change from the UI, i know where to effectively make it in the database, and got to demonstrate to Brad why my systems knowledge would be tough to replace.

Daily Victory #2

The corporate website hosts a set of user forums. Somehow a few weeks ago, they stopped working for no apparent reason. Anyone who worked on the development side of implementing them is employed elsewhere now, so there wasn't anyone with detailed knowledge to fix them when they broke.

Until today.

I found and fixed the problem.

This is grounds for a work-related mega-squee, because these damn things have been the bane of my existance since they broke, just trying to find someone who knew anything about how they worked. Having discovered today that we no longer employ anyone who knew the workings made me decide to dig into them myself- and the fix ended up being super-turbo-mega-easy- someone, probably thanks to a workplace distraction like a phonecall or other interruption ended up creating a key violation in the database by making two administrative roles with the same name- which in turn caused the whole thing to go into a ground-loop repeatedly whenever anyone tried to access the forums (which dutifully made the attempt every ten seconds for fifteen minutes before failing). Next step- making the stupid things not allow such a duplication before creating the role, or having them simply fail silently (or return an intelligent error).