Second Contract In Finance - My Thoughts

[minestrone]

Or the Edinburgh financial where unique ids on tables were banned, so if you wanted to join cutomer to customer_address you had to match up first_name, last_name, DOB etc etc etc which were on both tables, when the whole schema is designed that way a simple 100 line proc turns into a 1000+ line proc of unreadable crap which you cannot get working for a day because you missed a middle name.

The flat earth society might seem funny from the outside but when you have to live with them and abide by their rule of law...

[Zippy]

The best bit was that the cron job called Perl script that called a URL on the server which called a Perl script which then called the stored proc to do the batch and the 'dateRollOver' script.

Crikey! I bet that was to do with getting around security between different boxes. <draws breath through teeth - 'not my problem guv'>

[minestrone]

I never realised before this thread, even at the big banks, it's all cron jobs, batch processing and "oh ****" rollback scripts? I'd have imagined something a lot better.

To give them their credit, in the last year many of the banks have went out and embraced the latest pile of cutting edge tulipe on the market, GWT.

[HairyArsedBloke]

If only the developer that wrote this area had understood java.util.GregorianCalendar and the one line he needed he would have saved the bank millions.

If only it was that simple. For example, Columbus day in the US is a holiday in the bond markets but not in the equity markets.

[minestrone]

Crikey! I bet that was to do with getting around security between different boxes. <draws breath through teeth - 'not my problem guv'>

This was the bank that had a data center which let a "van load of coppers" in to "deal with someone on the roof".

We never did hear what happened to the 2 million quid of boxes.

"but no data was taken, honestly, no data was taken"

[Zippy]

This was the bank that had a data center which let a "van load of coppers" in to "deal with someone on the roof".

We never did hear what happened to the 2 million quid of boxes.

"but no data was taken, honestly, no data was taken"

Boxes - £10k
Minestrone - £200k
Data - Priceless

[minestrone]

If only it was that simple. For example, Columbus day in the US is a holiday in the bond markets but not in the equity markets.

They had a table of 'holidays' from all the regions, they just had to cross reference the date of the region's batch job to the holiday table.

Rather than do a ifCurrentDate == holidayDate {//don't run} the 'rollOverDate' script would work out if the batch was to run for that date tomorrow, if not move the run date onto the next date. So there was a current date and a run date table.

When Christmas Day was after a bank holday a few years ago and the system buggered up people were dragged in on Christmas Day to fix a batch job that was never going to run.

[oversteer]

I work for a company that does loads of data imports and they are processed by a variety of scripts, shell scripts, bodge database tables and manual imports/rollbacks. Sometimes it all breaks and nobody notices for a few days, then a customer complains and we fix it.


Does this qualify as financial experience?

[HairyArsedBloke]

I work for a company that does loads of data imports and they are processed by a variety of scripts, shell scripts, bodge database tables and manual imports/rollbacks. Sometimes it all breaks and nobody notices for a few days, then a customer complains and we fix it.


Does this qualify as financial experience?

That sounds like HAB Inc.

[minestrone]

Crikey! I bet that was to do with getting around security between different boxes. <draws breath through teeth - 'not my problem guv'>

Actually, you could fire off the batch jobs from any browser in the world.

"Right can every one come and look at this URL here, i'm going to paste it into the browser and get Hong Kong running again, is this date right? region?"

And of course when the business demanded to do the URL run the person would not know that the reply from a batch running 50 million trades might take longer than the BBC entertainment page.

"It no work, I press F5" 100 million trades.
"It no work, I press F5" 150 million trades.
"It no work, I press F5" 200 million trades.

and so on until...

"It no work, I press F5" 900 million trades.

then...

bang, server goes tits up

2 minutes later

"wing wing, wing wing"

"why this no working, my boss very important, you get sack"

Do one.